Looking Closely at the Birth of Impressionism

This illustration is one of my oil paintings, Monet's House and Garden, which is available as a print from SusanSternau.com.

I’ve just been to the Birth of Impressionism show here at the de Young Museum – a great collection of paintings traveling from their permanent home in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. As I concentrated on sidling around the crowds of people with audio guides, I was able to really zoom in on some of my favorite canvases and enjoy the unique surface textures and brush strokes of the paintings. Later in the evening I replayed the show in my mind (without the crowds) and was able to repeat the pleasure of looking really closely at canvases by some of my favorite painters.

I’ve seen many of these great paintings reproduced, but for me, there is nothing like looking at originals. Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare, has always been one of my favorites because of the atmospheric effect of the clouds of colored steam and light that transform the vast space of the glass-enclosed railroad station. The painting has a flat surface in reproduction, but in reality the surface is textured and pitted overall with layers and layers of pigment. Likewise, Manet’s flowers and seascapes aren’t flattened by reproduction, but come alive with individual descriptive brush strokes where I can see not only the width of the brush, but the mark of each bristle in the paint. Monet’s The Magpie has built up crusts of white paint highlighting the creamy snow, and melting blue shadows cast by the fence. The reproduction in the gift shop couldn’t begin to compete with the original.

In the Birth of Impressionism show, the progression of paintings from a dark and academic Salon style, to outdoor scenes actually painted outside give the impression of stepping from darkness into light. The radical change in painting style within a few years time, and within the space of a few exhibition rooms, redramatizes the familiar story of Impressionism and recaptures the fresh spirit of that moment.