Foreign palette: Beyond the frame
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.