European Travelog D2E3: Impressions of Impressionism at Musée d'Orsay
The museum which holds most of the masterpieces from Impressionism, the greatest revolution in painting since the Renaissance, started life as a railway station.
In 1900, when the Gare d'Orsay was inaugurated, it was the first electrified urban terminal station in the world. It included a luxurious hotel and a grand reception room. By 1939 it was too small for accommodating the long-distance trains that were in operation and was closed. It was then used as a collection point for the dispatch of parcels to prisoners of war, and in 1945, the station was used as a reception centre for liberated French prisoners of war on their return to France, and for shooting movies according to Wikipedia.
In the 1960s, there were plans to demolish the Gare d'Orsay and replace it with a new building, but wiser counsel prevailed and the railway station Gare d'Orsay became the museum, Musée d'Orsay in 1986.
The museum has a grand entrance which befits its history as one of the most technically advanced railway stations of its time and now as the home of some of the most iconic art of the 19th century.
The museum map that we pick up at the entrance has a preview of the masterpieces we are going to see.
We're welcomed by a replica of the Statue of Liberty.
The museum traces the growth of Realism with artists like Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet ; the emergence of Impressionism with the works of Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and the evolution of post-Impressionism with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin.
We start with the Realists. According to Wikipedia:
Realism was an artistic movement that emerged in France in the 1840s. Realists rejected Romanticism, which had dominated French literature and art since the early 19th century. Realism revolted against the exotic subject matter and the exaggerated emotionalism and drama of the Romantic movement. Instead, it sought to portray real and typical contemporary people and situations with truth and accuracy, and not avoiding unpleasant or sordid aspects of life. The movement aimed to focus on unidealized subjects and events that were previously rejected in art work. Realist works depicted people of all classes in situations that arise in ordinary life, and often reflected the changes brought by the Industrial and Commercial Revolutions. Realism was primarily concerned with how things appeared to the eye, rather than containing ideal representations of the world |
| Jean-Francois Millet, The Angelus (1857) |
Millet recalls: “The idea for The Angelus came to me because I remembered that my grandmother, hearing the church bell ringing while we were working in the fields, always made us stop work to say the Angelus prayer for the poor departed.”
Although Millet himself sold the painting for 1000 francs, many years after his death, a bidding war between the US and France ensued, ending some years later with the Louvre purchasing the painting for a price tag of 800,000 gold francs and then transferring it to Musée d'Orsay when it was established in 1986.
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| The Gleaners (1857) |
This painting, also by Millet, was one of his most controversial paintings. It shows three women in the act of gleaning— collecting the bits of grain left in the fields following the harvest. This is in contrast to the the abundant harvest in the distance which belong to the landlords and also a depiction of rural poverty, something that was not a topic of conversation in the Paris Salon or among the upper classes. The size of the painting - 36 x 27 feet was something typically used for heroic or religious paintings and Millet had used it for showing the common folk. This was also painted a short while after the civil unrests of 1848 and the elite feared that this stark depiction of poverty and the huge difference between the upper classes and the masses would trigger another round of unrest and this painting did not receive a warm reception.
The next work that we see, The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Caillebotte had it's own share of controversies.
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| The Floor Scrapers, Gustave Caillebotte (1875) |
This was one of the first paintings to feature the urban working class and emphasized the play of light on the workers' bodies and the wooden floor. It was rejected by France's most prestigious art exhibition, the Salon, in 1875. While depicting female nudes was considered normal, the depiction of working-class people in their trade, not fully clothed, shocked the jurors and was deemed a "vulgar subject matter".
Another painting which outraged the classicists was the Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet which marked the transition from traditional art to modern art.
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| Luncheon in the Grass, Édouard Manet(1863) |
As James Payne explains in his wonderful video about this painting: "She is not nude, she is naked.
The nude is posed, perfect and idealized; the naked is someone with no clothes on."
The depiction of the woman was particularly scandalous at the time because she is not depicted as a mythological or allegorical figure, which was the norm for nude figures in art. Instead, she appears as a modern, contemporary woman, which was seen as provocative and indecent. Manet’s brushwork is loose and visible and many critics even accused him of submitting an incomplete work.
The 1863 Salon’s jury was stunned and refused to display it. It gained significant attention at the Salon des Refusés, an alternative salon established by those who had been refused entry to the official one. Some people were so infuriated by it that guards had to be posted around it.
The model for both of the female figures was Victorine Meurent - and she appears in eight of his other works. She was also an accomplished artist in her own right and a pathbreaker for women in the arts. The other famous work in which she appears is Olympia, again by Manet.
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| Olympia, Édouard Manet(1863) |
As the museum website says, even though Manet quoted numerous formal and iconographic references, such as Titian's Venus of Urbino, Goya's Maja desnuda, .... the picture portrays the cold and prosaic reality of a truly contemporary subject. Venus has become a prostitute, challenging the viewer with her calculating look. This profanation of the idealized nude, the very foundation of academic tradition, provoked a violent reaction. Critics attacked the "yellow-bellied odalisque" whose modernity was nevertheless defended by a small group of Manet's contemporaries
Luckily for us, there is an exhibition going on till 14 July 2024 called "Paris 1874 Inventing Impressionism" to mark the 150th anniversary of the event which launched Impressionism.
As the booklet we receive says:
In Paris, on 15 April 1874, an exhibition opened which marked the birth of one of the most famous artistic movements in the world, Impressionism. For the first time, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot, Pissarro, Cézanne and Sisley came together independently to exhibit their works: clear and luminous paintings, translating with a quick and lively touch their fleeting impressions felt in front of the motif. They freed themselves from the Salon, a major official exhibition dominating Parisian artistic life, and guardian of the academic tradition. In a time marked with political, economic and social upheavals, the impressionists offered an art in tune with modernity. Their way of painting "what they see, [...] as they see it", as the art critic Ernest Chesneau wrote, surprises and disconcerts.
On April 15, 1874, the Société Anonyme exhibition opened its doors, with some 200 works selected by the artists themselves - without the sanction of a jury, nor the intervention of a dealer. They are hung by them, in Nadar's former workshop, on walls covered with red-brown wool.
The first room, gives pride of place to Renoir's painting, with dazzling snapshots of the modern life, the Paris of fashion and entertainment, its boulevards, its dancers and its spectators, so many motifs also observed by Monet and Degas. “You who enter, leave behind all old prejudice!”, warns the critic Prouvaire, noting a few days after the opening that some paintings in this nameless exhibition "give[s] above all "the impression" of things, and not their very reality".
In 1874, even if its jury was particularly severe, the Salon was "neither worse nor better" than in previous years, according to the critic Castagnary: "What it lacks is the capital work ... which ... becomes a date in the history of art.” Indeed, that year, the exhibition that will go down in history is not the Salon.
An article published around that time says that for the price of one franc, "Artfully positioned gas lighting will enable art lovers whose business occupies them all through the day to come and examine (all through the evening) the artworks of the modern generation."
Not everyone was thrilled. Critics referred to the artists as a “gang of nihilists,” “intransigents,” “Communards” and even “insane.”
What follows is a deluge of masterpieces that redefined Western art with works from Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne and Van Gogh.
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| Impression, Sunrise. Claude Monet(1872) |
Given the large crowd around the painting with tour guides and their clusters, this impression was all I could get of the painting.
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| Boulevard des Capucines, Claude Monet (1874) |
The painting captures a scene of the hustle and bustle of Parisian life from the studio of Monet's friend, the photographer Felix Nadar.
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| The Ballet Rehearsal on Stage, Edgar Degas (1874) |
In 1862, while copying masterpieces at the Louvre, Degas met Edouard Manet, and the other Impressionist painters. It was in part due to Manet’s influence that Degas turned to subjects from contemporary life, including café scenes, the theater and dance. This photo is cropped from Degas's backstage portrait of the ballet dancers at the Paris Opera
As Julia Fiore's article on Degas and the ballet dancers he portrayed says, he didn’t care tremendously about the ballet as an art form, let alone frilly pastel tutus. He endeavored to capture the reality of the ballet that lurked behind the artifice of the cool, carefully constructed choreography.
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| The Ironer, Edgar Degas(1869) |
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| Repasseuses, Edgar Degas(1884-86) |
Degas would return to this theme of the life of the working class again later with the depiction of a young lady tired after a day of ironing.
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| Flowers in a vase, Auguste Renoir (1869) |
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| Poppies, Claude Monet(1873) |
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| Dance at Le moulin de la Galette, August Renoir(1876) |
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| Young girls at the piano, Auguste Renoir(1892) |
This painting was commissioned for a new museum in Paris, the Musée du Luxembourg, which was to be devoted to the work of living artists. As the Met Museum website says, aware of the intense scrutiny to which his submission would be subjected, Renoir lavished extraordinary care on this project, developing and refining the composition in a series of five canvases.
We stop for a quick break for a short rest in the cafe which provides a wonderful view of the Seine and the Louvre across the river.
We were looking forward to seeing Van Gogh's Starry Night, but a notice informs us that it has been given on loan to another museum, but we are welcomed by the artist himelf.
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| Self portrait (1889) |
Vincent van Gogh painted a lot of himself - with over forty-three self-portraits, paintings or drawings in ten years. This picture was painted in 1889, a year before he ended his life.
Unlike other portraits from the Renaissance art we have seen, such as the Madonna who is often calm and composed, this picture is wrought with anxiety - the swirly lines and whirlpools seem to indicate the turbulent state of the artist's mind.
In 1886, Van Gogh had moved to Paris to join his brother Theo and resided here, in the north of the city, till February 1888.
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| Terrace of a Cafe on Montmartre (1886) |
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| The Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnières (1887) |
From the museum website: Unlike other Impressionists who, in summer, were able to afford even a modest holiday in the country, Vincent, by choice as much as necessity, sought out locations near to where he lived. This was the case with Asnières, a town situated on the banks of the Seine, not far from the fortifications of Paris. There he painted and drew several views of bridges or, as here, of the restaurant de la Sirène. Both style and subject had precedents in Impressionism, yet the painting moves away from them in some respects. It reflects the exterior appearance of the buildings more than the convivial pleasures enjoyed inside.
The model in the picture below is Agostina Segatori, a former model of Corot, Gérôme and Manet with whom Van Gogh seems to have had a brief love affair a few months before this portrait was painted in 1887. Agostina Segatori's face, in which red and green prevail, is an incarnation of the artist's objective: "to be able to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green".
Van Gogh had painted three versions of his bedroom and this is the third (and smallest) version of these. This is how he described his picture: I have painted the walls pale violet. The ground with checked material. The wooden bed and the chairs, yellow like fresh butter; the sheet and the pillows, lemon light green. The bedspread, scarlet colored. The window, green. The washbasin, orangey; the tank, blue. The doors, lilac. And, that is all.
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Italian Woman (1887)
This work, which does not look like the other Van Gogh works, was created by him when working with Paul Gauguin. The museum website says: This painting seems to show an evening at the Folies-Arlésiennes. Gauguin's influence is clear as Van Gogh scrupulously applies the principles developed by his friend. The reference to Japanese art is also evident, with the unusual elevation of the horizon, and in the strange, decorative foreground where the curves and counter curves of the hair are dominant. The multitude of characters, the variety of their style of clothes and the way they overlap, skilfully portray a feeling of crowdedness and saturation. The portrait of Madame Roulin on the right, who alone turns to look at the spectator, seems to express a claustrophobic terror. |
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| Bedroom in Arles (1888) |
Van Gogh suffered from a mental disorder and committed himself to an asylum in May1889.
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| Hospital at Saint-Rémy-de -Provence(1889) |
Van Gogh painted The Siesta when he was in the mental asylum.
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| The Siesta (1889-90) Unlike his self-portrait, this picture exudes a sense of calm - the relaxed pose of the sleepers, their shoes and tools set down on the side and the animals grazing in the background. This picture was inspired by the work, Noonday Rest, of another artist who Van Gogh greatly admired - Jean-Francois Millet whose work we saw earlier in the museum. While the theme is the same, it's a mirror image of Millet's work and what we see here is uniquely Van Gogh as seen by the brush strokes and the energy of the painting in spite of depicting what is a moment of rest. |
He was released from the asylum in May 1890 and he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town just north of Paris
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| Thatched Cottages at Cordeville (1890) |
As the museum website says: Here the painter subjects the landscape to a veritable transmutation driven by psychic forces. The peaceful thatched cottages, which can still be seen in old photographs, seem to have been lifted by some powerful telluric force that has dilated them. The wild, swirling design makes the roof undulate, sends the tree branches up in spirals, transforms the clouds into arabesques....all the elements in the landscape unite in distorting their contours and give the whole scene a supernatural air.
As continuation of medical attention was required, Vincent's brother, Theo van Gogh, thought that Dr. Gachet's background and sensitivity toward artists would make him an ideal doctor for Vincent during his recovery.
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| Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890) |
Van Gogh drew two portraits of Dr.Gachet and this is the second one of them. The purple medicinal herb foxglove on the table is a plant from which digitalis is extracted for the treatment of certain heart complaints, perhaps an attribute of Gachet as a physician.
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| Doctor Gachet's Garden in Auvers (1890) |
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| The Church at Auvers(1890) |
This depiction of the church was one the seventy pictures he painted in the last two months of his life. I first saw this picture when it featured in a Doctor Who episode where the time traveling doctor meets Vincent Van Gogh.
From the museum website: This church, built in the 13th century in the early Gothic style, flanked by two Romanesque chapels, became under the painter's brush a flamboyant monument on the verge of dislocating itself from the ground and from the two paths that seem to be clasping it like torrents of lava or mud.
From the museum website: This church, built in the 13th century in the early Gothic style, flanked by two Romanesque chapels, became under the painter's brush a flamboyant monument on the verge of dislocating itself from the ground and from the two paths that seem to be clasping it like torrents of lava or mud.
With this we exit the painting section and move on to the sculptures.
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| Hercules kills the Stymphalian Birds, Antoine Bourdelle(1909) |
This sculpture depicting the sixth task of Hercules catches our eye with its posture and tension.
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| Polar Bear, François Pompon |
This polar bear, weighing a few tonnes, but stripped to its bare essentials, got its sculptor name and fame at the age of 67.
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| The Thinker, August Rodin |
Rodin's thinker is here in his usual pose, contemplating the state of the world.
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| The Gates of Hell, Auguste Rodin |
There's the original plaster model of Rodin's work, The Gates of Hell, from which many bronze casts were later made. Rodin worked on this over the course of thirty seven years.
From Wikipedia: The Thinker (Le Penseur), also called The Poet, is located above the door panels. One interpretation suggests that it might represent Dante looking down to the characters in the Inferno. Another interpretation is that the Thinker is Rodin himself meditating about his composition. Others believe that the figure may be Adam, contemplating the destruction brought upon mankind because of his sin
As we leave the museum, we are asked to enter our impression of impressionism.
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| Five stars ! |
How we did it
Tickets: Book tickets ahead instead of wasting time by waiting in line at the museum entrance.
There are two options for tickets - buy the tickets from the museum website at €16 per adult or buy the Paris Museum Pass which includes entrance to Musée d'Orsay - they have 2-day and 4-day options - so choose the one that meets your schedule. What we did was purchase the Musée d'Orsay tickets from the website and the 2-day Paris Museum Pass (the timer starts from the point of first usage).
Time Required: We were in at 10:45 AM and were done by 4 PM.
More Info
A preview of what to expect before going to the museum
Watch Loving Vincent, a marvelous animated movie about the death of Van Gogh
Watch Doctor Who and Van Gogh go to Musée d'Orsay
Watch Doctor Who and Van Gogh see the Starry Night
Watch Doctor Who and Van Gogh see the Starry Night
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