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Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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[Write bold words on board before class. Pass out frames]
The relationship between humans and nature can be easily woven into all aspects of our
teaching. Geography--or the place a human lives--and biology--all the living things in that place,
including humans—eventually generate a culture for that society, a government, and an
economy that usually interacts with other societies. PERSIA is a helpful anacronym to help
students analyze any society and compare it with others.
P E R S I A –which is why we are here this week in WAM
Childe Hassam said that ART is “Active Observation”. (Johns, 59)
Our mission in this course is to find ways to actively involve our students in observing to
understand the art of the Impressionists--by using the paintings as a primary learning resource.
The student skills we hope to develop are: observation, recording data, asking questions,
hypothesizing relationships, proving or verifying theories, and verbal-visual-oral
expression. So let’s put ourselves into the role of our students for a moment.
Do you remember the frenetic pace those last weeks of school -- wrought with dozens of
impending changes for this coming year within a war-torn world? I know we’ve all been trying to
avoid thinking about it, but in many ways the turmoil was similar to the world of the Impressionist
artists featured in the exhibit—the Barbizon school of artists from France and the American
Impressionists. Let’s start our course by taking a parallel “mental path” through the chaos of
our own rapidly changing century.
Think about how you withdraw from the real world into the world of self?
From reality to your soul.
Take a few minutes to put about 4-5 words and sketches of your “impressions or imagined past’
of “better, simpler times” IN THIS EMPTY FRAME.
In other words, in what ways do you become a “refugee from your environment” in 2003?
[Play Claude Debussy’s Prelude l ‘apres-midi d’un faune (1892)]
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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DISCUSSION
How far back did you go? Last week’s vacation?
Does anything in your frame indicate a place - landscape?
Have you included any of the realities of colonial rural times where farming was a way of life
taken for granted for centuries?
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Everything humans needed to survive came from nature.

Clocks were unnecessary for work was done from sunrise to sunset.
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Work was scheduled by the climate, seasons and weather.

Each family, and many villages, were self-sufficient and dictated by the
surrounding environment, not GENDER or even wealth necessarily..

The small community sustained itself by cooperation and sharing skills and
products in a barter economy.

Humans had had to tame or reshape the wilderness to produce what was
needed—a time consuming task using human and animal power; therefore, work
was difficult and the pleasure of leisure simple.
Many of the items and emotions in your frame can be found in the landscape painters’ works we
will see in the October Exhibit. This is why they continue to touch our lives today.
The Impressionists’ quest for beauty and truth more than 100 years ago evolved from their
unwillingness to face the rapidly changing world around them (Johns, 36). They too were,
according to Beth Johns, “refugees from their environment”. Their works of art continue to bring
solace (provide a respite) to the 21st century by helping the viewer escape into nature in another
time and perspective.
1[Hudson River School painting Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits, 1849 (Hughes, 11)]
The early French and American landscape artists showed wilderness vistas where the viewer
did not enter as in this Hudson River School painting by Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits,
1849. It shows Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole with his friend poet William Cullen
Bryant. They and the viewer observe, but do not enter.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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2[Transparency of Willard Metcalf’s Prelude(1909) or use handout image (B to Art)]
WHILE the Barbizon and Impressionist painters made humans part of nature by involving the
viewer’s senses-- the artist put the viewer into experiencing the landscape--take the path-- enter
a smaller view and in the moment it was created on canvas. To understand why, we must
consider the world of the 19th century as it suffered the growing pains of a modern world.
The force and vitality of a maturing America was similar to the French period of reorganizing
their monarchy. In both countries the common man—the laboring masses—were claiming
control of their political organization. I hope you’re all comfortable with the story of the
formation and operation of our Constitutional representative democracy. If not, I’ll be happy to
give anyone a refresher course this week over lunch.
But what was happening in France? (how foggy is you college European history?)
We can pick up the shared thread of these two nations as French soldiers fought alongside the
American Patriots during the War for American Independence to create a democratic nation.
These French soldiers, however, were still ruled by an autocratic monarch.
France had no great empire from which to break away, although in the aftermath of revolution
there arose a Napoleonic empire with Paris as its center. At first, old distinctions of aristocratic
status crumbled, as revolutionary clubs like the Jacobins (‘jA-kah-bahns) called on the people of
France, and outside to cast off their chains.
As “We the people of the United States” formed “a more perfect union” under the new
Constitution with an elected Congress instituting our new republic, the Parisians stormed the
Bastille on July 14, 1789. Throughout France sporadic riots against feudal lords broke out from
numerous separate centers—there was no unified system of revolt like America’s provisional
governments linked by the Committees of Correspondence.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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Most of the agrarian peasants in France were almost wholly free and in many regions owned
small amounts of land. Small feudal dues were annoying, but the land tax (taille) from which
nobles and clergy were exempt was burdensome. Yet, they were better off than most European
peasants. The rural folk took part in the revolution, not because they were hopelessly
downtrodden, but because they were well enough off to wish to better themselves. The rising
middle class (the bourgeois) had grown richer through trade and aware of the philosophies of
the rights of citizens in England and US, but they, too, were generally excluded from politics.
An unwieldy and inefficient bureaucracy, not so much tyrannical as irresponsible and unsuited
to the needs of a large commercial and agricultural nation, led to an ever-growing deficit. There
was no true representative assembly, but the Estates-General was asked to remedy a practical
bankruptcy. Once called, these nobles, clergy and upper middle class commoners took upon
themselves the wholesale reform of the state. Calling themselves the National Assembly, they
abolished the monarchy and condemned the King to death.
3[Transparency of woman rebel (Davison, 254)]
Fortunately, Americans did not have to kill their tyrant, King George III, but the French mob
(principally women), inflamed by hunger and rumors that the King would dissolve the National
Assembly, marched to Versailles and dragged King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the
guillotine --launching a Reign of Terror.
In order to relieve the original problem--financial stress, the ecclesiastical estates were declared
public property and the state assumed the support of the clergy.
A series of revolutions continued with a military coup in 1799 that handed over power to one of
revolutionary France’s most successful new generals, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon’s armies
marched across Europe carrying revolutionary ideas along with death. By the time Napoleon’s
armies had retreated from Russia and Spain, some 750,000 French soldiers had died. Inspired
by grievances and new ideas, the everyday lives of ordinary people and their relationships were
permanently changed, not always as they had hoped, creating Modern Times.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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After the fall of Napoleon and his exile to St. Helena, the old order was restored. Nonetheless,
ideas of revolution were not eliminated. There were revolutions in France in 1830, 1848 and
1870 and on each occasion they inspired revolutions elsewhere on the winds of technological
changes in transportation and communication.
In fact the winds were no longer needed to move a steamboat!
One could travel 110 miles a DAY by stagecoach or jump on a train at 30 miles an HOUR (later
up to 60 mph). The dangerous month-long ocean voyage between the NYC and Paris (La
Havre) was cut to two weeks or less. Letters and newspapers mass produced on the rotary
press, as well as passengers, spread the ideas across the globe. The telegraph also sped news
around the world. Many people celebrated the opportunities speed brought both economically
and socially, but Henry David Thoreau's words from Walden (1854) remind us of the stress of a
faster pace, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." We might say the same of Email.
To understand the basic difference between the two nations’ view of nature—or landscape—or
sense of place, we also need to consider how long human beings had been shaping each
country’s geography:

In long settled France where there was no true wilderness remaining, humans’ presence
in nature was celebrated. (Johns, 22)
The Barbizon school of French landscape painters celebrated urban life and technology
even while trying to escape it.

America celebrated the human impact on nature as the vast, growing territories of
wilderness were cleared and settled.
The American landscape Impressionists preferred pure, unsullied nature with no sign of
urban encroachment. It still existed!!
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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With the advent of machines doing more work, more quickly, the landscape and daily life had
been transformed and was in constant flux. The Industrial Revolution began in Europe, not
for long. Industrial spies like Samuel Slater and Francis Cabot Lowell soon seized the initiative
to start America’s own Industrial Revolution right here in the Blackstone River Valley. What was
its impact?

Whether on a French or American farm, life was similar--once the American settlers
cleared the forest and broke the ground. But times were hard and there was little specie
(hard cash) to pay the mortgage. Factory work, paying cash wages, offered a way out of
the dilemma. You either sent your daughter or the whole family lost the farm and went off
to work in the mill.

If you were skilled craftsmen, interchangeable parts and the masses of unskilled workers
threw you out of work or vastly decreased your income.

Older European factories, or mills, were not pleasant places to work—no fresh air, for
starters. In America, planned cities like Lowell, MA tried to avoid the problems found in
British industrial cities—and early mill villages in New England. Even in Lowell, workers
picketed and petitioned for better hours, wages and conditions—non violently at that point
of history. The French July Revolution of 1830 was to gain a higher wage for the lower
classes, better living conditions, and a more democratic society. It was fought largely in
Paris commune, an administrative unit—not Communistic, although Socialistic thought s
were on the rise.

Mass production in a factory ended rural life for a majority of people in both nations.
Working in a factory had many advantages for those who did not like the hard, risky
farming business and rural isolation. Consumers benefited with cheap, plentiful and
more accessible goods.

The class struggle was accelerated between industrialists and entrepreneurs (the urban
middle class and then the wealthy upper class known in France as the bourgeois) vs.
wage laborers (or French urban proletariat). The unskilled workers were the hapless
victims in the inevitable march of PROGRESS. If you were a female, your father or
husband determined your status based on the broader hierarchy of wealth and power.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
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Now, the range of revolutionary ideas was widened to attract industrial workers and
students. Classical economists had stressed the importance and self-sufficiency of the
individual, but in reaction to the industrial conditions socialist thinkers like Charles Fouier,
Etienne Cabet, Louis Blanc and Pierre Joseph Proudhon urged state intervention. While
Auguste Comte declared the social physics of Positivism.
The Industrial Revolution brought impressive changes in all areas of life - geography,
economy, intellectual thought and culture. Where would all the workers live?
4[Transparency of poor district in Paris (Davison, 254)]
The need for housing close to the industries led to Urban Growth (urbanization) in both
countries. Shadowed by soot and grime, (Davidson, 81) crowded streets, buildings to house
more people-tenements, fewer green spaces and trees led some to escape. Paris’ population in
1801was just over 1/2M and by 1836 doubled. (Forbes, 15) The same pressures were found in
cities across the U.S. - like Worcester.

French painters escaped Paris by train with their aluminum tubes of paint for the suburb
of Versailles and the forests of Fontainebleau near Barbizon in 1840s—away from the
limitless urban distractions.

American painters similarly escaped NYC and Boston to rural areas and seacoasts.

Both country’s painters worked en plein air—outdoors—to capture the landscape‘s
impression
Instead of fleeing, others sought to use the new technology of the era to improve their cities and
society: In 1857 Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux transformed 840 acres of
swamps, rocky land, hog farms and slaughterhouses in a multi-faceted pleasure ground of
NYC—Central Park.
5[Transparency of 1889 expo poster (Davison, 276)]
While ten years later Baron Haussmann and his architects demolished some 20,000 of the city’s
poorer district houses to transform Paris into the technological and leisure metropolis.
By improving public facilities—running water, gas, electricity and public transportation-- these
utilities also transformed cities from dangerous criminal haunts to illuminated pleasure domes.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
6/22/2017
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It was a matter of national pride and competition with Great Britain’s expositions to display the
modern Paris at the Exposition Universelle and continuously build new wonders like the Eiffel
Tower at a later fair.
Paris was the recognized capital of art in the world.
The L’Ecole de beaux-arts had been revived in 1815. The rising class of businessmen,
industrialists, and urban professionals were the new art collectors. They needed guidance of art
critics and dealers to know what was “a good art investment”. Durand-Ruel was an important
art dealer who handled many of the Impressionists with stores in Paris, London and later NYC.
These new art patrons sought paintings which could be understood and appreciated without the
benefit of a classical education. Meanwhile the French government held a strangle hold on
art—curriculum- and the annual exhibition called The Salon –arbiter of taste and main purchaser
of new works of art.
In 1863 the Salon made the headlines as 3/5s of the submissions were rejected. The press
gained Emperor Louis-Napoleon’s attention and he paid a surprise visit to the Salon to see the
rejections. Seeing nothing so terribly wrong with them, he ordered all the rejected works
exhibited in the Palaise de I’Industrie near the official Salon—The show was called the Salon
des Refusés and it was the first showing with the state’s sanction for several of the Barbizon
artists. (Poole, 73)
6[Transparency of Manet’s Cafe Guerbois, 1969 (Pool, 89 ]
The expositions enlightened all classes of society.

Workers with a bit of cash in their pocket and legislation enacted to ensure a least oneday off for all employees.

The nouveau riche of a growing middle class looking for excitement and entertainment.

Tourists no longer tied to a workday dependent on daylight or the season thanks to the
wonder of electric lights. Trolleys and railroads connected cities to the suburbs and
beyond. Here in Worcester the trolley company opened Pinehurst Park in Auburn to be
able to make money everyday of the week.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
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American students traveled to Europe. Others went in search for remnants of the past
“better, simpler times”. Many American artists headed for Paris to study and hang out at
cafes and cabarets with the Barbizon and Impressionistic painters. Discussions and
support networks helped clarify their thoughts about capturing the poetry of nature.
7[Transparency of Hokusai’s The Hollow of the Wave of Kanogawa (Tsai]

Even the poor artists, trying to exhibit their works at these expositions, took advantage of
the opportunity to explore feast of global sharing of anything new, including wonders of
Japanese art—which led Monet to consider unusual angle of vision and composer
Claude Debussy to choose Hokusai’s The Hollow of the Wave of Kanogawa for the cover
of the score of La Mer (1903)—a vague, dreamy piece with a type of Impressionistic
“luminosity.” We’ll be listening to it later this week and you will hear the harmonies that
serve the colourisitc purpose of expressing moods and pictures, according to Arnold
Schoenberg.
The PROGRESS of the era was self-perpetuating.
All the knowledge gained by natural scientists since the Renaissance was being put to practical
use. Fine-tuning inventions, new scientific discoveries and the constant exchange of ideas kept
the cycle kept going.

Charles Darwin’s newly published theories on the origin of man uprooted orthodox
thinking.

Social development in the American Republic moved from youthful optimism and faith to
a maturing nation with complex psychological and aesthetic needs. (Tyler) A bit like my
8th graders!!

Impressionist dissolution of form in painting became guided by scientific principles of
recording optical sensations of light and color that hit the retina. (Davidson)
o As early as 1828 James Nicol devised the prism and Bunsen and Kirchoff
developed the spectroscope as an important scientific tool.
o Chemist Eugene Chevreul published The Principles of Harmony and contrast of
Colours, and their Application to the Arts.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
o French physicists Arago and de Fresnel (of light house lense fame) published their
work on the polariscope. The Impressionists used the principle thesis that colors
in proximity influence and modify one another and a color seen alone appears to
be surrounded by a faint aureole of its complimentary color (red on white seems
tinted by green—today’s “negative afterimage).
o It was the work of physicists Hermann Helmholtz, James Clark Maxwell and
Ogden N. Rood who came to realize that brilliance of light would be rendered by
allowing the spectator’s eye to reconstruct it from the prismatic colors of which it
was composed. Thus, in the Impressionists’ works the juxtaposed colors are
chosen to blend. (Pool, 15) So, science was helping create a new art form.

The development of the camera in 1839 rendered the “view or landscape” painter
obsolete by the photographer’s truthfulness. However, some artists, like Manet, Monet
and Degas turned this new invention into a tool to study in detail and at length subtle
details of light, which they had been unable to see and hence record before. (Forbes, 11)
It also helped narrowly frame the view. In the rising aesthetic and philosophical tide of
machine age landscape painting became a human activity, which could, at its best,
convey more than bare facts or the harsh reality, like Jacob Riis’ photos of urban squalor
in New York City. (Tyler, 60)
The psychological and economic physical world was becoming more potent than the world of
soul. (Hassam, Johns, 60). But what were the facts of the soul?
With the scientific discoveries and a transient population to urban life came a decline of
traditional religion, which had always been an acceptable subject in works of art. Many
people turned to spiritualism, Transcendentalism, or mysticism for answers.

In New England Transcendental reformers’ attempted to regain the Divine harmony
between farmer and nature in utopian communities at Fruitlands in Harvard, MA and
Brooks Farm in West Roxbury, MA. They believed the closer to nature people stayed,
the better they would be to be able to use their natural intuitive sense as well as the other
the five senses. Other Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson chose to write to try
to sway the public’s opinions to trust their inherent human powers. Abolitionist Abby
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
Kelley Foster of Worcester frequently used agricultural rhetoric when trying to change
people’s opinions: to prepare the ground, plant the seeds of new ideas, weed out the
negative and old ways of thinking, and finally, reap the harvest of a better world.

American Impressionist George Inness accepted Swedenborgian mysticism --for he
believed his artistic emotion was of divine origin. He preferred art to awaken emotions,
not to teach or instruct or appeal to intellectual or moral senses. (Ask Art bio)

French impressionist Camille Pissarro attributed the change partly to the frightened
bourgeoisie, who were astonished by the immense clamor of the disinherited masses.
They felt it necessary to restore to the people their superstitions, beliefs, -- the bustling of
religious symbolists, religious socialists, idealistic art, occultism, Buddhism, etc. The
Impressionists, he claimed, have the true position—robust art based on sensation, and
that is an honest stand…Salvation resides in nature.” (Pool, 176)
Salvation for many Americans and new immigrants, inspired by Expansionism and Manifest
Destiny, was in fertile soil and opportunity of the west. The American Dream gave hope and
optimism to those who had not risen from the struggling masses. Sadly, America’s youthful
optimism came to a crashing halt with the outbreak of the War Between the States from 18611865 and the period of Reconstruction which followed. All of the American Impressionists in the
Exhibit lived through these bloody, divisive times. It is interesting to note that none of them were
from the South. I wonder who were the southern artists of this time? Was the South’s lack of
industry and large cities the reason we have no Southern Impressionists in the Exhibit?
Meanwhile all but two of the French Exhibit artists were experiencing the Third Republic, born in
the blood of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. When France capitulated to Prussia (today’s
northern Germany and Poland) after an invasion and occupation and lost Alsace-and parts of
Lorraine, it set the stage for a short lived and bloody experiment in Socialism of the Paris
Commune in 1871. –and undeclared Civil War in north and south of France over ethnic
divisions. The Barbizon Impressionists dispersed during the national crisis, largely to avoid
military service and the unrest. Several like Monet, Pissarro and Daubigny used their exile to
learn more about English art. Their hopes to come back to more prosperous living was dashed
as the war was followed by a financial crash and six year depression.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
8[Transparency of Claude Monet’s Impression, soleil le vant, 1872 (Tsai)]
Finally, 39 artists banded together to form a co-operative in hopes displaying works the Salon
continued to reject. Their first exhibition in April 1874 once more took the name Salon des
Refusés. Critics singled out Claude Monet’s Impression, soleil le vant and refered to the
Salon as the Exposition des impressionists, lumping together into a movement which in
reality never existed—these artists were just trying to sell their works!! (If anyone is interested in
pursuing female Impressionists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt were in the circle—you’d have
to search for their landscapes, if any.)
The artists labeled Impressionists used bold color, light reflection and new framing devices to
create a refined realism seeking neither to idealize nor to represent reality. W.C. Seitz said, “In
reflections the artifices so important to workaday life are transformed into abstract elements in a
world of pure vision.” (Pool, 86) More prosperous times were ahead.
So, in this chaotic ear a whole host of conventions, beliefs and traditions had been questioned,
found wanting, swept away and replaced by a completely new set of values—including the
beginnings of Modern Art.
Today, we have trouble understanding what all the fuss was
about, but it is helpful to consider the reactions to Pop and Op art colors, perspective and
subject in our own times to understand the difficulties these artists faced.
Out of the chaos of the war and reorganization years in both countries came a period of much
celebration as people contemplated the strange feelings that usually accompany the end of a
100 years unit of human measure. (Davidson) Impressionism was opening new windows to
fresh air and sunlight, producing a clear and cheerful view of America and France. (Eliot, 155)

America had survived its national adolescence, but New England mourned the end of its
historic colonial role, its forests were gone---more trees today! —and the fields barren
with westward migration of farmers to soils that do not grow rocks. There was a regional
effort to celebrate the good old days of America’s colonial heritage in the late 19 th century
through historical societies, sentimental songs, and picturesque New England images.
People were ready to buy the such American landscapes.
Historic Overview of the times of Impressionism
By Karen Board Moran
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6/22/2017
Even though New York City had replaced New England as the political and economic
center of the US, there was a great public spirit of the wealthy people, especially in
Boston). Worcester followed Boston’s lead and in 1896 Stephan Salisbury III founded
WAM and by 1905 was buying the work of the Barbizon school and early Impressionists..

Everybody likes a party and for the artists a chance to show their work:
1893 Chicago Columbian Expo marked 500 years since the Europeans found out there
was a Western Hemisphere.
1904 St. Louis World’s Fair marked the turn of the century party.
1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition celebrated the new link between the
oceans.
At this point the Great War (World War I) ended the period of landscape arts –so much a part of
coping with the growing pains of the Industrial and Scientific Revolution. As the world moved
into the postwar modern age it would face new needs and challenges with new art forms.
Taking the advice of my 8th graders for more time in the gallery without a docent talking so long
about each painting, we’ll head for the galleries to experience the visual evidence of the
changes I’ve mentioned.
After lunch we’ll be using the timelines in your binders to reinforce some of the events and
inventions I briefly mentioned. Are there any questions before we move up to the Galleries?
Now, let’s stretch. Do we need time for a bathroom break? We’ll gather in the lobby at ______