“Five or six lunatics deranged by ambition – one of them a woman – have chosen to exhibit their works,” French critic Albert Wolff wrote in a review of an art exhibition in Paris in 1876. The lunatics in question were a group of up-and-coming artists: Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Edgar Degas.
Almost 150 years later, we know now that those lunatics took over the asylum. The impressionists, who rebelled against the old masters by painting lighter, brighter, ephemeral scenes, are today’s old masters; what was so shocking then is now all over our calendars, coffee cups and phone cases. But back in 1876, those looking at their works “are content to laugh at such things,” Wolff wrote sniffily. “But it makes me sick at heart.”
There were eight impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886. From the first, much fuss was made of these paintings that captured quotidian moments like picnics, laundry day and music lessons, rather than the few subjects deemed acceptable by the establishment (the big three: biblical, mythological or historical). The impressionists – a derogatory label they would later adopt with pride – saw worth and beauty everywhere: a garlic seller or a ballet dancer or a baby nephew deserved immortalising as much as Jesus or Napoleon.
But newspapers recorded the public gasping, hooting and even fainting over such art. There was a shared suspicion that these sloppy rebels weren’t bothered to paint properly, or perhaps simply couldn’t. After the very first show in 1874, one critic accused Monet of having “declared war on beauty”, while Morisot’s own tutor wrote to her mother with his damning verdict of her new gang: “All of these people are more or less touched in the head.”
A huge collection of French impressionism has arrived at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which is mostly on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston – a gallery founded in 1870, just four years before the first impressionists were shocking France. “Making everyday reality the subject of art – it seems so obvious today, but it’s a wonderful thing to remember that it wasn’t inevitable,” says Katie Hanson, a curator at MFA Boston. “It took courage, and a village, to make impressionism a reality.”
French Impressionism opens on a room for a literal village: Barbizon, a small town located about 50km from Paris, to which many artists flocked due to its proximity to the very paintable Forest of Fontainebleau – and for being conveniently on a train line. The School of Barbizon inspired many of the impressionists who followed 30 years later. There are even direct links to be found – take Narcisse Virgile Diaz de la Peña, who followed Theodore Rousseau around the forest watching him paint; 30 years later, Diaz was in the forest when he ran into a young Renoir at work and gave him the career-changing advice to lighten up his palette.
“When you start peeling back the onion you find all these points of connection and mutual support underneath,” says Hanson.
MFA Boston is home to more than 500,000 works, which means it can send off this many masterpieces without a second thought. It can even do it twice: French Impressionism was first staged at the NGV in 2021, before it was closed prematurely due to Covid lockdowns. It is what Julian Barnes once called a “masterpieces-on-a-washing-line approach”; you may find you struggle to appreciate every single painting on display.
But you can navigate French Impressionism by playing who-knows-who. There are the mentors like Eugène Boudin who, despite not being an impressionist, gets a whole room to himself for having spotted teenage Monet’s talent and encouraged him to work “en plein air”, as he did; and a few works by Diaz, who supported Renoir and even bought him paint when he couldn’t make ends meet. Then there are the friends who didn’t quite make it into the gang – like Norwegian impressionist Frits Thaulow, French realist Henri Fantin-Latour and, of course, Édouard Manet, who was so close to the impressionists that he was widely regarded as their leader, despite his choice to never exhibit with them.
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There are also the admirers, like Vincent Van Gogh, who was painting in France at the same time but noted he was not “one of the club”, and even a spot for the admired: Victorine Meurent, who was Manet’s favourite model and also a painter, whose fabulously haughty self-portrait was found in a Parisian flea market in 2010 and acquired by MFA Boston in 2021. The four-year delay in this exhibition returning to Melbourne means Meurent now gets to share the spotlight with Manet’s flirtier view of her – though the exhibition remains an undeniable sausage fest; in the four years since the first attempt to stage it, the number of Morisot paintings has gone from one to two.
Pleasure lies in discovering the impressionists’ relationships with one another. Misanthropic Paul Cézanne and argumentative Degas; the social butterflies Monet and Renoir; Morisot, the rare woman among men and a dab hand at dealing with their moods and egos; and Pissarro, the cheerful link between everyone, affectionately dubbed “Papa”. They painted each other’s wives, brothers, children, servants, crushes. Not that they always got along – “they were artists, after all,” Hanson says.
So why Boston? Why did a US city take such a shine to the impressionists when Paris was falling over itself to laugh at them? French gallerist Paul Durand-Ruel, the impressionists’ greatest cheerleader, was already selling Barbizon landscapes to eager Americans when impressionism arrived. When he first exhibited the impressionists in Manhattan in 1886, both the public and press were more curious and impressed than the French had been a decade before. Durand-Ruel opened a permanent gallery in New York in 1888, selling impressionist masterpieces to wealthy east coast collectors, including Bostonians.
“Boston was prepared to like impressionism because they already liked French painters and unidealised landscapes,” says Hanson. “Bostonians had a real love of nature and naturalism – think of Whitman or Thoreau. People in the Boston area were really focusing on nature’s many splendours, so impressionism wasn’t a step too far for them.”
If you saw the aborted version of French Impressionism in 2021, it is much more maximalist this time around, with the NGV styling the interiors to look like an opulent Bostonian mansion. The plush lounges scattered around don’t make for good vantage points on busy days – but there are enough instantly pleasing sights on any horizon to keep up morale if you get frustrated by the crowds: the fizzy pastels of Monet’s view of Venice, an unexpected Van Gogh, Renoir’s instantly recognisable Dance at Bougival. So while you’re dodging prams or queueing for a look, think back to those first exhibitions in Paris – at least you are not peering past angry Parisians in top hats. Probably.
