Impression: Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890 by Richard R. BrettellReview by: Margaret MacNamidheNineteenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (SPRING SUMMER 2003), pp. 352-354Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23537824 .

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Brettell, Richard R. Impression: Painting Quickly in France 1860-1890. Yale UP,

2000. Pp. 240, 169 color illustrations. ISBN 0-300-0844-171

Margaret MacNamidhe, University College Dublin

Art-historical scholarship on Impressionism over the course of the last thirty or so

years has been among the most energetic and ambitious in the field. The vast social

changes of the period have received particular attention, especially those wrought or

accelerated by Hausmannization. The development of mass leisure, the notion of the

flâneur, the prevalence and complexity of prostitution in Paris - these issues and more

have been intensively studied in the work of T. J. Clark, Robert L. Herbert, Hollis

Clayson, Joel Isaacson, Anthea Callen, and Griselda Pollock, among others. This

influential body of scholarship (surveyed in a bibliographic essay in this book) has

well and truly complicated any assumption of Impressionist painting as, for example,

"scenes of amiable suburban sociability," to quote the Directors' Foreword to this

sumptuously illustrated catalog. (The exhibition was conceived of by Brettell who

also wrote the lengthy ten-chapter catalog.)

Less easy to point to however, are studies which include as a structural component

or specific site of study the Impressionists' famously radical approach to the painted

surface; a paucity which is being increasingly addressed. In addition to Brettell's book,

a major study by Callen on Impressionist painting technique has recently appeared.

Brettell's concerns can be usefully compared to an important earlier study, Herbert's

1979 article "Method and Meaning in Monet." Compiling an inventory of the variety

of facturai marks Monet amassed on the canvas, Herbert showed that by the 1890s

Monet came painstakingly to build up his paintings through cumulative, complicated

sessions in the studio as well as in front of the portable easel. Through close

examination of paintings and contemporary criticism, Herbert questioned the central

perception of Monet's Impressionism as invariably spontaneous, virtually reflexive,

and en plein air - the indefatigable painter racing, as it were, to keep up with the light

(in Herbert's analysis, Monet's devotion to capturing atmospheric effects was

increasingly expressed in a complex layering of paint). But for Brettell, such

scholarship by Herbert and others (John House's doctoral thesis also analyzed Mon

et's techniques in detail) has tended to divest Impressionism of "those very elements

of spontaneity, so essential to the earliest idea of Impressionism" (35). Yet Brettell

and Herbert emphasize both that the notion of painting quickly is crucial to the

perception of Impressionism, and the fact that this central characteristic has not

received the attention it deserves. (Pragmatic evidence of this appears in Brettell's

admission that the title of the exhibition worried prospective lenders who imagined

the notion of rapidity might be construed as a slight upon their works.)

And Herbert was concentrating on later Monet: as he noted, few canvases by the

artist from the 1860s and early 1870s display the crusting-up of the surface that

Monet increasingly developed. Paintings which look as if they were "painted rapidly,

as a direct translation of the artist's sensations" (16) are Brettell's subject: works from

the Impressionist period as a whole - Brettell argues for a reconfigured directness in

some of Monet's later canvases - as well as before (an early chapter of the book is on

352 Reviews

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Manet). In addition to Monet, Renoir, Morisot, Pissarro, Caillebotte, and Sisley are

discussed. Brettell also examines works by Postlmpressionists: the three early works

Cézanne submitted to the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874, and a number of

works by Van Gogh - the latter's urgent, inelegant, prolific mode is considered an

extension of the earlier generation's forceful gesturalism.

Impressionist painters not usually associated with a penchant for effects of rapid

painting also appear: Degas, for example, an artist considered both part of yet

separate to Impressionism (exhibiting with the group he never thought of himself as

akin to them) proved himself capable of, or rather open to, the painting of an

"Impression." Openness and improvisatory flair are key to Brettell's account. In cer

tain works - oils on canvas, relatively rare in his œuvre - Degas demonstrated that he

could "abandon himself to his brushes and paints" and explore a "process of direct

improvisation" (211). (The arresting Visit to a Museum [1879] is one such work:

Brettell's choice of paintings, which includes compelling, less typical canvases by

familiar names, is a particular strength of the book.)

Degas's proclivity for experimentation in graphic media usefully underlines the

"Impression's" characteristics: as Brettell points out, Degas's compulsion to rework

runs counter to the priority of the improvisatory gesture. But as Brettell is also aware,

the very capacity to rework is at issue: no such permission, or rather, a different kind

of permission is exacted by oil painting. Its integral demand is that it be given time to

dry - but the "Impression," always a matter of oil paint, is always a type of painting

that should never look like it took much time at all. Here's the rub: it isn't possible to

work quickly, or rather, to work quickly all of the time, in oil painting. Brettell remains

uncommonly sensitive to this proprietary trait in description after description (his

observational gifts remain unflagging across a very large number of works). For

example, a "high level of chromatic planning" helped Monet's brisk Jean Monet

Sleeping (1867), and Red Mullets (1870): restricted, effective ranges of warm colors

meant that Monet didn't have to wait for a definitive dryness between stages to keep

muddy mixtures at bay, while Red Mullets retains a "slithering wetness" of effect. On

the other hand, deep blacks and purples in Monet's Towing a Boat, Honfleur (1864)

had to wait their turn - at least a day - until the mustard yellows into which they slice

had dried. In those "icons of early Impressionism"(115), the 1869 paintings of La

Grenouillière by Monet - Renoir's differing responses to the same scene are discussed

in another section - Brettell estimates the brush's very weight (heavy, depositing a

thick edge at each similar choppy stroke).

Unprepossessing examples of the "Impression" are also described: a number of

paintings by the retiring Sisley - an artist always mentioned but rarely assertive in

discussions of Impressionism - which appear all wan, beige, and featureless, emerge

as combinations of "aesthetic passivity" (201) and busy, veritably scribbly facture.

(Brettell emphasizes a hallmark graphism in Sisley's œuvre.) An echo of such

attention to moments of lapse or reticence is Brettell's noting of the strangely inert

tree in Monet's On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868).

This quality of observation, rendered in lively prose, is sustained throughout, yet

at the same time the book's disposition toward the general should be noted. The

Nineteenth-Century French Studies 31, Nos. 3 & 4 Spring-Summer 2003 353

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second and third chapters assess the concepts of the "Impression" and of rapid

painting in rewardingly specific historical contexts: the differences between the vital

dis-tinguishing terms for stages of finish - from croquis to ébauche - in the French

painting tradition are illuminated; the Barbizon School's innovatory plein-air

etchings and cliché-verres discussed, while a ready lineage from late eighteenth

century plein-air landscape sketches to Impressionism is questioned. But the

"Impression" and rapid painting tend to function, and increasingly so, as impersonal

and persistent phenomena: different painters, and at different points in history,

become skilled in their expression. For example, "Monet had mastered the Im

pression by the summer of 1870," and "left few areas of visual experience untouched

by this method" (116); Manet's and Monet's varying abilities in plein-air painting are

adjudicated; while Manet's Grand Canal, Venice (1875) "seize[s] an Impression" of

the city (88). The defusing of Manet's complexity in favor of an "informal" and "performative

painter" (69) I found rather dissatisfying, and I was disappointed that while the

central tradition of the critical response to Impressionism was acknowledged, it was a

resource left untapped, especially in discussions of individual paintings. It is in

teresting that, as Brettell says, the Impressionists themselves did not did not use the

word "Impression" to refer to works that look rapidly painted. They used those

distinguishing terms from the French painting tradition at whose pinnacle stood the

tableau, the enduring, fully unified work - which remained, as Martha Ward has

shown, a defining but reconfigured aspiration for Impressionist and Neolmpres

sionist painters. Such a door to further interpretive possibilities and contextual

purchase, partially opened in Brettell's account, might have been pushed through

more decisively, nonetheless, this is a book rich in the observation of paintings and an

extremely engaging and rewarding contribution to the field.

Bullard, Alice. Exile to Paradise: Savagery and Civilization in Paris and the South

Pacific, 1790-1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Pp. 380. ISBN 0-8047-3878-5

Doris Y. Kadish, University of Georgia

Alice Bullard's Exile to Paradise provides an exhaustive historical account of the

deportation and exile of some 4,500 Communards (including twenty women) to

New Caledonia, which was inhabited by the indigenous Melanesian Kanak who had

come under French control in 1853. Ironically, ridding France of the "savage" French

rebels was seen not only as a way to regenerate France but to further the French

civilizing mission in New Caledonia. Presumably, the Communards would become

civilized by bringing civilization to the Kanak. Bullard painstakingly records the fail

ure of this project over the near decade before the deported exiles were amnestied in

1879 and 1880. Archival records by missionaries, administrators, déportés, and others

are used to show that the Communards were subjected to a system of French colonial

authority that more rightly deserved the appellation "savage" than the Kanak.

Moreover Bullard demonstrates that generally speaking the actions of the French in

354 Reviews

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