What a pleasure it is to visit these days the Musée Jacquemart-André, not far from the Champs Elysées, which is holding an exhibition on an unusual theme, titled as Impressionist Workshops in Open Air.

There are more than 50 celebrated masterpieces art lovers are familiar with, but bringing them to Paris from major European and American museums and putting them together, even if temporarily, is an exploit in itself. The reunification point of these magnificent creations is not just the outdoor scenes they represent but the fact that all of the paintings are the results of famous artists actually working in unison under open skies.

To quote Claude Monet, “I perfectly understand pencil sketches being drawn by artists in their studios, but painting a landscape under a roof is totally incomprehensible to me. My studio is where the sky, the sun and the waves are.”

The Musée Jacquemart-André exhibition retraces the history of Impressionism from the forefathers of the movement to the great masters

The birthplace of the Open Sky Revolution, if one may name it so, was actually England where in the early 19th century painters like Joseph Turner, Richard Bonington and John Cotman had made names for themselves by their extraordinary talents. However, fed up with constant rains and absence of steady, natural light in London, they moved together to Normandy in France in the 1820s, to create their desired and much sought after sun-washed landscapes and seascapes. They were enthusiastically joined in by many French and European painters like Delacroix, Gericault, Isabey, Daubigny, Millet, Riesener, Jongkind and Troyon.

A new artistic movement was thus born and a number of Normandy’s coastal towns, especially Honfleur and Saint Simeon, were crowded every summer by new, younger painting-under-open-sky enthusiasts such as Manet, Monet, Boudin, Courbet, Bazille, Whistler, Degas, Pissaro, Caillebotte, Renoir, Cezanne and Gauguin, to name only a few.

They would also paint together at Dieppe and Aval ports and other Normandy beaches, often disagreeing with each other, their verbal exchanges taking violent turns, but their creations nevertheless were breathtaking. A legacy was thus born for future artistic generations.

Two women Impressionists, Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalez are also part of the current show at the Jacquemart-André Museum and, I would like to talk about Eva Gonzalez who would certainly be a discovery for many of the readers.

Born in Paris in 1849 in a well-to-do Spanish family, she was introduced at the age of 20 to the legendary Impressionist Edouard Manet to pose as a model. Watching him working, she herself quickly became interested in painting and, noticing her enthusiasm, the master taught her the initial techniques, though not with a great deal of hope.

Upon seeing the results nevertheless, Manet was astounded by the maturity of her work and encouraged her to go ahead. He was so impressed that he painted a portrait of hers, not as a model lying on a sofa but as an artist creating her own tableau. She soon exhibited her paintings at the annual international art exhibition in Paris in 1870, to the delight of art lovers but also of art critics and many well-known painters of the era such as Edgar Degas and Paul Cezanne.

Later, encouraged by Cezanne, she started participating in the open-air impressionist workshop experiments every summer in Saint Simeon and Honfleur in the company of many masters of British, French and other European origins.

Though the quality of talent is undeniable in the paintings of Eva Gonzalez, their quantity remains sadly restricted owing to her premature death at the age of 34 in 1883. Consequently, finding a few of her works at the Jaquemart-André show is a delight as well as a revelation.

The Open Air Impressionism exposition is also an emphasis on the role played by Normandy in the evolution of the movement and the exchange of creative ideas between young talents with a new concept.

The exhibition that began on March 15 is to go on until July 25 this year.

The writer is a journalist based in Paris: ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 10th, 2016