First Impressions
3 June
Paris, France
As a huge art fan, I knew exactly what I was looking forward to most about my trip to Paris: visiting the Musée d'Orsay. Housed in an old railway building, this world-famous art museum features some of the best-known paintings from the Impressionist movement of the 19th century.
As I wandered through the Impressionist gallery, I appreciated masterpieces like The Ballet Class and The Card Players. Even though I had admired them hundreds of times on my computer screen, nothing could have prepared me for the wonder I felt when I finally laid eyes on the real thing. While it was hard to pick a favourite painting out of so many amazing works, the artists who made the deepest impression on me were two of the greatest Impressionist painters, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
I could see from Monet's works that he was greatly inspired by nature. In the last three decades of his life he painted mostly scenes from his garden. One of these scenes is shown in the famous piece Blue Water Lilies, which I studied for quite a while in the gallery. I couldn't believe it when I heard he did around 250 paintings of the same water lily pond, all in different colours and styles. It is amazing that every time Monet studied this simple scene, he brought the pond's beauty to the canvas in a unique way.
Renoir, I noticed, preferred to paint scenes of everyday life. For me, the most interesting of his paintings is his 1876 masterpiece Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, which shows life in a busy neighbourhood of Paris on a Sunday afternoon. When I saw it up close, I was struck by the small areas of light across the painting, and the way the soft edges of the figures seemed to mix together. There's so much going on, but so little clear detail. This effect makes the lively movement of the dance almost jump out at the viewer.
Although the paintings had very different settings, it was their similarities that stayed with me long after I left the Musée d'Orsay—similarities which can be seen throughout the Impressionists' paintings. Monet and Renoir, along with other like-minded artists, sought liberation from the rules of the old style. Everyday subject matter was the main focus of their works, as opposed to the history paintings that had traditionally dominated European art. They employed free brushwork and used colours to show the effect of light on things, creating paintings that were far less realistic than the works that came before. To me, these techniques are the essence of the Impressionist view of art. Impressionist artists did not try to paint every detail in a scene—just a brief “impression” they had at that moment, burning with vivid colours and light, before it disappeared.
The Impressionists' vision inspired a whole new generation of Post-Impressionist painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, whose works are also displayed at the Musée d'Orsay. It is also worthy of note that Post-Impressionist painters were not the only ones to be influenced by Impressionism—the movement has had a lasting influence on modern art, encouraging artists to look at the world from an entirely new point of view. It certainly left a lasting impression on me too!