IMPRESSIONISTS : THE QUIZZ

Which country has more artists considered as Impressionists ? France or the USA ?
And which artists are considered the core of the Impressionism movement ?
Answer here.

DEGAS : DANSEUSES RUSSES

Edouard Degas (1834-1917) was trained in the tradition of Ingres and draftmanship that he never totally abandoned. His finest works were often done in pastels making the dancers look like floating above the tilted floor like a butterfly. This picture was made in 1899 at a time where he had serious eye problems.

In 1977 it sold at auction for $ 264,000 in New York to the Sara Lee Corporation which endowed it later to the National Gallery London.

RENOIR : BAIGNEUSE COUCHEE

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a French leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family . As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china .

Renoir filled his work with the joie de vivre of a happy temperament. When we look at his work we know that we are the casual stroller who takes in this slice of life in passing but nothing more. However he makes us extremely happy to see it. A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art.

In the 1890s Renoir began to suffer from rheumatism, and from 1903 (by which time he was world-famous) he lived in the warmth of the south of France. The rheumatism eventually crippled him (by 1912 he was confined to a wheelchair), but he continued to paint until the end of his life. In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, French Riviera, on December 3.

In 1977 his Baigneuse Couchée fetched $ 660,00 at a auction sale in New York City. Two of Renoir's paintings have sold for more than $70 million : Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre sold for $ 78.1 million in 1990.

PISSARRO : BOULEVARD MONTMARTRE

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro, known as Camille Pissarro, was born on July 10, 1830 on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, Danish West Indies; to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, of Sephardic (or "Morrano") Jewish ancestry, and Rachel Manzano-Pomié, a Dominican of Spanish descent. His parents sent him to Paris at age 12 to a small boarding school. It was there that the director, seeing his interest in art, advised him to take "advantage of his life in the tropics by drawing coconut trees." When he returned to St. Thomas in 1847, this advice had been taken to heart.

He moved to Paris in 1855 and studied there with the French landscape artist Jean Baptiste Camille Corot. He later became associated with the Barbizon school. Afterwards, he came under the influence of Claude Monet and other impressionists. During the Franco German War he lived in England, where he made a study of the landscapes of Joseph Mallord Turner. On his return to France he settled in Normandy. An active, productive Master of his art until the end, Camille Pissarro succumbed to blood poisoning on 13 November, 1903 in Le Havre, France.

His landscapes have a naturalism that places him close to the Barbizon school and a firm classical structure shared only by his good friend Paul Cézanne. This Blvd Montmartre in Paris is part of a series of the same scene that he painted under different weather conditions in 1897.

In 1973 it went on auction for £ 161,764 in London ($275,000). The scene to the right is another version of Blvd Montmartre at night which is now property of the National Gallery London. Whilst in England in the 70s and back in the 90s, Pissarro was introduced to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who bought two of his London’ paintings. Durand-Ruel subsequently became the most important art dealer of the new school of French Inpressionism.

In March 1893, in Paris, Durand-Ruel organized a major exhibition of 46 of Pissarro's works along with 55 others by La Gandara. But while the critics acclaimed Gandara, their appraisal of Pissarro's art was less enthusiastic. During his lifetime, Camille Pissarro sold few of his paintings. By 2005, however, some of his works were selling in the range of $ 2 to 4 million.

Pissarro died in 1903 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

RENOIR : MADAME HENRIOT

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) worked as an apprentice painter, painting flowers on porcelain plates. Having saved some money, in 1862 Renoir entered the Atelier Gleyre and there made friends with Monet, Sisley, Bazille and later Pissarro and Cézanne. Renoir achieved recognition earlier than his friends.

In 1879-80, he sent several portraits to the official Salon, among them Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary and Portrait of Mme Charpentier and Her Children. In the 1880s, he abandoned Impressionism for what is often called the “dry style”. In 1886, the art dealer Durand-Ruel exhibited 32 of Renoir's paintings in New York, thus opening the American market for Impressionism. Renoir died in Cagnes on 3 December 1919 and was buried in Essoyes.

This picture painted in 1876 is an oil on canvas (65.9 x 49.8 cm.) represents Henriette Henriot, an actress at the Odéon theatre in Paris. Renoir painted several portraits of her, notably a Madame Henriot in a boy costume (below).
The picture above was sold in 1962 for £ 5,500 only and fetched £ 33,875 in a sale in Tokyo, Japan in 1969. It is now on the walls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a gift from the Adele R. Levy Fund.

Renoir was one of the great worshippers of the female form, and he said `I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.' One of his sons was the celebrated film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), who wrote a lively and touching biography (Renoir, My Father) in 1962.

Currently most Renoir's works sell in between $100,000 and $ 2 million.

MONET : CHARING CROSS BRIDGE

French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted in 1901 this oil on canvas (25x36 ins) representing Charing Cross bridge in London.

In 1899 Monet began painting London scenes, seeking to elicit an emotional response through the use of color and light. Monet wrote, "The Thames was all gold. It was beautiful, so I set to work in a frenzy following the sun and its reflections in the water."

Monet stayed in London after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 with his friend Alfred Sisley and both were impressed by Turner's and Constable's work.

This picture is part of the Ryerson collection and was auctioned off in 1963 for $ 64,680.

DEGAS : DEUX DANSEUSES EN SCENE

Degas (1834-1917) painted this picture in 1874 as from 1870 he increasingly painted ballet subjects: Dance Class (1871), Dancing Examination (1874), The Star (1876-77). Among other reasons they were easier to sell. Degas’ ballerinas have determined his popular image to his day.

He sketched from a live model in his studio and combined poses into groupings that depicted rehearsal and performance scenes in which dancers on stage, entering the stage, and resting or waiting to perform are shown simultaneously and in counterpoint, often from an oblique angle of vision.

This picture was sold in 1927 for 7200 Pounds.

PISSARRO : LE RUISSEAU A OSNY

This brook at Osny was painted by French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, who endured prolonged financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism. Despite acute eye trouble, his later years were his most prolific : in all, Pissarro painted several hundred canvasses. The Parisian and provincial scenes of this period include Place du Théâtre Français (1898) and Bridge at Bruges (1903).

Pissarro was born in St Thomas to Abraham Gabriel Pissarro, a Portuguese sephardic Jew and Rachel Manzana-Pomié, from the Dominican Republic. Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, when he went to a boarding school in Paris.

After the Franco-Prussian war, Pissarro stayed in London for many years where he came back many times after returning to France. Known as the "Father of Impressionism", Pissarro painted rural and urban French life, particularly landscapes in and around Pontoise, as well as scenes from Montmartre.

Camille's great-grandson, Joachim Pissarro, is currently the Head Curator of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His great-granddaughter, Lélia, is a successful painter and resides in London. During his lifetime, Camille Pissarro sold few of his paintings.

This picture sold for 560 Pounds in London in 1922 and fetched 26,000 Guineas in 1965 (1 Guinea=1 Pound and 1 shilling). By 2005, however, some of his works were selling in the range of $ 2 to 4 million. In 1981, a record was set for the artist at Sotheby's impressionist and modern art auction in New York when La Rue Saint- Lazare sold for $ 4,512,806.

DEGAS : DEUX BLANCHISSEUSES

"Deux blanchisseuses portant du linge" by Edgar Degas (1834-1917). Almost blind for his last twenty years, Degas worked mostly in pastel with increasingly broad, free handling. He loved to paint simple people's lives insisting on the dureness of their condition.

Five of Degas's pictures of laundresses including this one were shown at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876.
In his novel the Dram Shop, French writer Emile Zola described laundresses at work, detailing the physically demanding labor involved in the act of pressing the iron. Similarly Degas emphasized the effort involved in carrying a heavy load of linen by showing the limping of the two women.

In addition to his artistic endeavors, Degas amassed a vast collection of art and considered to establish his own private museum. The museum was never realized and Degas passed away in 1917. The next year a big Degas sale was auctioned off by Christie's in London and this picture fetched 2300 Guineas (1 Gn=1 Pound and 1 Shilling).

SISLEY : BOUQUET DE FLEURS

Painted by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) born in Paris from English parents. Sisley was an Impressionist but was overshadowed by Monet and Renoir. After he went to London in 1871 with Claude Monet, he was influenced by Turner and even Constable.

Among Sisley's best known works are Street in Moret-sur-Loing and Sand Heaps, both owned by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing shown at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Compared with that of his colleagues, Sisley's development was neither complex nor dramatic ; the personality his work exudes is reticent and sober, marked by some typically English severity that his French colleagues did not share. This picture fetched however $ 99,960 at a sale in 1963.

MANET : LA RUE MOSNIER AUX PAVEURS

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was born into the ranks of the Parisian bourgeoisie on January 29, 1832. His Mother, Eugenie Fournier, was a woman of refinement and god daughter of Charles Bernadotte, the Crown Prince of Sweden. Edouard's father, Auguste Manet, was a magistrate and judge who hoped that Edouard would someday follow in his footsteps. Manet did not.

Instead Manet became a painter and printmaker who in his own work accomplished the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. Manet broke new ground in choosing subjects from the events and appearances of his own time and in stressing the definition of painting as the arrangement of paint areas on a canvas over and above its function as representation.

Manet began his career with The Absinthe Drinker (1858), a painting depicting a solitary man amongst the shadows of the back streets of Paris. Exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, his Déjeuner sur l'herbe ("Luncheon on the Grass") aroused the hostility of the critics and the enthusiasm of a group of young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionists, ie Monet, Sisley and Renoir. Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. He died, in Paris, on April 30, 1883.

This picture La Rue Mosnier aux Paveurs (50cm x 65cm) was sold in 1986 for $ 10.9 million, then the highest auction price for a modern picture. It showed the view from the studio MAnet occupied from 1872 to 1878 and is mentioned by Emile Zola in his novel "Nana". Originally part of the collection of Samuel Courtauld, La rue Mosnier was one of a number inherited by his daughter, Mrs Sydney Butler, wife of "RAB" (Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, 1902-1982, English Conservatice politician). When she died, RAB was left a life interest in the picture which hung in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, or in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

MONET : ARGENTEUIL AU COUCHER DU SOLEIL

Painted by French Impressionist Claude Oscar Monet (1840-1926), this picture represents the Seine river at Argenteuil and is one of the numerous scenes of this small city that Monet used to paint in the 70s. It is an oil on canvas that measures 60x81 cm.

Monet, with his powerful, ever alert eye, was able to paint at the same time brilliant pictures and also rather grayed ones in neutral tones. He was more reactive, he had more of that quality that psychologists of that time called "Impressionability", hence he is rifgthly considered as the leader of the Impressionists.

He had a huge influence on painters like Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro and Renoir. This painting was sold in 1963 for $ 111,220.

MONET : LA TERRASSE A SAINTE ADRESSE

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was the founder of French impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to out-door landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise.

After the outbreak of the franco-Prussian war in 1870, Monet took refuge in London in September 1870. While there, he studied the works of Constable and Turner, both of whose landscapes would serve to inspire Monet's innovations in the study of color. In the Spring of 1871, Monet's works were refused authorisation to be included in the Royal Academy exhibition.

In 1872, he painted Impression, Sunrise depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan in Paris. From the painting's title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term "Impressionism". La Terrasse à Sainte Adresse (oil canvas 98x130cm) was painted in the summer of 1867 when Monet was in desperate financial straits and had to ask assistance from his father (seated in the canned chair in the picture).

The picture was eventually bought by the Reverend Theo Pitcairn, heir of a very wealthy family of Pittsburg (Pennsylvania), in 1926 for $ 11,080 from a dealer in 57th Street in New York. In 1967 David Bathurst, director at Christie's in London, spent a weekend at Bryn Athyn, a small village of Pennsylvania where Theo Pitcairn' s property was and where he had established the seat of the General Church of Jerusalem.

During his stay, David accidentally found that Theo Pitcairn had got in touch with David Wildenstein, the immensely powerful Parisian dealer, and Peter Wilson, Chairman of Sotheby's : he pressed Theo about giving the auction of La Terrasse to Christie's. Theo Pitcairn eventually agreed to let Christie's auction off "La Terrasse" which arrived in London in December 1967.

The American TV network CBS made a film for their program 60 Minutes about the London Art market and the arrival of the picture : the film went coast to coast and was invaluable publicity as La Terrasse sold for £ 650,000, just over $1,4 million to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Theo Pitcairn gave the proceeds to the charity he had founded, the Beneficia Foundation.

Monet died of lung cancer in December 1926 at the age of 86 and is buried in the Giverny church cemetery.

RENOIR : LA PENSEE

Pierre A. Renoir(1842-1919), one of the top three Impressionists fathers with Monet and Sisley, was born in Limoges, France, where he started painting decorations for the porcelain industry, gaining experience with the light, fresh colors that were to distinguish his Impressionist work and also learning the importance of good craftsmanship.

Renois is perhaps the best-loved of all the Impressionists, for his subjects---pretty children, flowers, beautiful scenes, above all lovely women---have instant appeal, and he communicated the joy he took in them with great directness. `Why shouldn't art be pretty?', he said, `There are enough unpleasant things in the world.' A view that should be shared by too many modern artists who think that Art must be ugly and provocative.

This exquisite picture painted in 1877 was one of the seven Goldsmith pictures which had blasted Sotheby's into orbit. It was bought in 1958 for 72,000 Pounds ($203,000) but in 1984 it was accepted by the Governement of Her Majesty The Queen Elisabeth II in lieu of tax from the Executors of the Jack Cotton Will Trust for a gross value of £2 million ($2.8 million).

The year 1984 was the start of a boom in Art prices and a period of mega-prices which continues to this day except for a decline from 1990 to 1993. Renoir died in Cagnes, Cote d'Azur, at the end of WW1.

MONET : LES BORDS DE SEINE

Claude Monet (1840-1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career.

After having experienced extreme poverty, Monet began to prosper. By 1890 he was successful enough to buy the house at Giverny he had previously rented and in 1892 he married his mistress, with whom he had begun an affair in 1876, three years before the death of his first wife. From 1890 he concentrated on series of pictures in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in different lights like notably the Cathedral of Rouen.

This picture was made in 1872, it is an oil on canvas measuring 21 3/4 x 29 ins. It was sold in Paris in 1912 for the equivalent of £ 1,070, then it was acquired in 1970 by Mr Ronald Lyon, a rag-to-riches property tycoon for $ 605,000. In May 2005, it was bought again for $ 4,83 million.

DEGAS : EUGENE MANET

Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas (or De Gas) (1834-1917), a keen observer, preferred to be called a Realist, although his style is related to that of Impressionists. His innovative composition, skillful drawing, and perceptive portrayal of movement is uniquely his own.

Degas also depicted social settings such as race courses, cafes, and music halls. He had a profound influence on later artists, Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec, and made sketches from living models to capture their spontaneity, later completing the paintings in the studio.

In his late years Degas was chatting in his studio with one of his few friends and many admirers, English painter Walter Richard Sickert. They decided to visit a café. Young Sickert got ready to summon a fiacre, a horse-drawn cab. Degas objected. "Personally, I don't like cabs. You don't see anyone. That's why I love to ride on the omnibus-you can look at people. We were created to look at one another, weren't we?" Nothing could be better defining Degas that this casual comment.

In 1981, this portrait of Eugène Manet sold for $5.3 million.

PISSARRO : LA ROUTE D'OSNY

This picture is by French painter Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and represents the road of the small village of Osny not very far from Pontoise (France) where Pissarro established his workshop in 1882. From the 1870s onwards, Pissarro professed passionate disdain for the Salons and refused to exhibit at them. Among the Impressionists, only he and Degas persisted in their unwavering defiance of the Salons.

To the question, "What makes a true painter?" Pissarro would answer that a true painter is the one who can put two tones of color in harmony. In other words, Pissarro defines the true painting in specifically visusal terms. Pissarro was a descendant of a family from Braganza, a Portuguese medieval fortified city near the Spanish border. The family were Marranos - Sephardic Jews who had been prohibited to practice their own creed and forced to convert to Christianity or suffer at the hands of the Inquisition.

This picture painted in 1873 was bought in 1963 for $ 102,900 in London. It is today part of the E.G. Bührle collection in Zurich (Switzerland).

MONET : LA POINTE DE LA HEVE

This painting shows the beach at Sainte-Adresse near Claude Monet's (1840-1926) home town of Le Havre, then a fashionable tourist resort. It was painted in 1864. Claude Monet is best known as one of the most outstanding Impressionist painters, however many of his paintings have romantic characteristics.

Late in his career Monet developed cataract disease in both eyes. This disease makes the eyes see colors differently. Whites turn to yellows, blues and purples turn to reds and oranges and greens turn to yellow-greens.

In 1963 this picture sold for $ 585,000 in London. More recently in June 2008, Le Bassin aux Nymphéa sold for a world record bid of £40.1 million ($ 79,138,799 at today's prices before commission) ; in May 2008, Le Pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil (1873) was sold for £21.5 million ($41 million) in New York.

ETUDE DU NU : DEGAS

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) had a profund sense of human character. A wealthy aristocrat (de Gas) by birth, he was trained in the tradition of Ingres and when he joined the Impressionists, he did not abandon his allegiance to draftmanship.

After beginning his artistic studies with Louis Lamothes, a pupil of Ingres, he started classes at the Ecole des Beaux Arts but left in 1854 and went to Italy. He stayed there for 5 years, studying Italian art, especially Renaissance works.

Apart from sculptures, Degas worked on a considerable amount of canvasses but about 50% of them were devoted to dance and dancers. This Study of a Nude was part of the important Henri Ford II's collection sold in May 1980. It fetched $ 900,000.

DEGAS : L'ABSINTHE

Painted in 1876 by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) , L'Absinthe depicts a woman and a man who sit in the typical Parisian bistro. The man, wearing a hat, looks right, off the canvas, while the woman, dressed formally and also wearing a hat, stares vacantly downward. A glass filled with the titular greenish liquid sits before her.

The painting is a representation of the increasing social isolation in Paris during its stage of rapid growth. Degas denounces the alcoholism of the French society. Nothing has really changed nowadays but nobody is interested any more in painting this sort of scene.

Edgar De Gas -he dropped the particule to adopt a more Republican Degas name- was born in Paris and is famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist.

In 1892, this picture went at an auction for 150 Pounds in London where it sparks controversy. The persons represented in the painting were considered by English critics to be shockingly degraded and uncouth. Many regarded the painting as a French blow to morality. The Irish novelist George Moore described the woman in the painting as a "whore"!

It is now part of the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France.