Touchingly Elusive --- Day 13/271

 

Walk: Hood

Distance: Just 2 miles, Sunday

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, ca 20 x 24"

What more can be said about the painting that inadvertently led to the term 'impressionism' that inadvertently led to one of art's most beloved movements and paintings?  

Well, that its calm delicate washiness seems to be impossible to capture on camera.  If you google it, you many images, all different.  

And, to Ciwt, that infinite elusiveness is as it should be.  Impression, Sunrise needs to be seen in person, and, if you are fortunate enough to attend the National Gallery of Art's current exhibition 1874 Paris: The Impressionist Moment between now and January 19, you can do that.  Ciwt is still hoping to go, above all to see that work, long one of her favorite paintings.

If she gets there, she won't be the only one going directly to it.  Impression, Sunrise is beloved by many, and, she understands, is the star of the DC show.

One can only guess the work's elevation to masterpice status was a surprise to Claude Monet, its creator.  He clearly didn't labor over it.  Famous for his insistence on encountering his natural scenes closely and outdoors, he painted Sunrise, Impressionism while looking through the window of his hotel room in the industrial port of Le Havre. While doing so it's probable Monet was still taking in his recent extended time in London where he had encountered - and likely been blown away by - JMW Turner's remarkable color and light-filled paintings of the smoggy, misty Thames.  

Giving the work a hasty title, Monet did enter it - along with eleven other pastels and oils - in the now historic, 1874 Societe Anonyme Exhibition where it got scant attention.  Except! from one critic who singled out Impression, Sunrise as the prime example of what he deemed the low level of art in the show produced by untalented hacks. According to him Monet and his friends were 'impressionists' not creating art but merely impressions of art.  Thus, inadvertently and to his probable complete chagrin, coining the name of what became an unstoppable art movement: Impressionism.

Ciwt thinks masterpieces are not created intentionally.  Works of art are, but the ones that speak to the minds and hearts of viewers generation after generation have a transcendant life of their own. From its offhand inception Sunrise, Impressionism became a poem of luminous light and atmosphere transforming something ordinary into a subject of ongoing wonder.  Hopefully Ciwt will get the DC to see it on its only trip to the States.