Whistler, James (Abbott) McNeill

Whistler, James (Abbott) McNeill
(b Lowell, MA, 11 July 1834; d London, 17 July 1903). American painter, printmaker, designer and collector, active in England and France. He developed from the Realism of Courbet and Manet to become, in the 1860s, one of the leading members of the AESTHETIC MOVEMENT and an important exponent of JAPONISME. From the 1860s he increasingly adopted non-specific and often musical titles for his work, which emphasized his interest in the manipulation of colour and mood for their own sake rather than for the conventional depiction of subject. He acted as an important link between the avant-garde artistic worlds of Europe, Britain and the USA and has always been acknowledged as one of the masters of etching.

Impressionism's beginnings

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.
Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.
In an atmosphere of change as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war, the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated the French art scene in the middle of the 19th century. The Académie was the upholder of traditional standards for French painting, both in content and style. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were valued (landscape and still life were not), and the Académie preferred carefully finished images which mirrored reality when examined closely. Colour was somber and conservative, and the traces of brush strokes were suppressed, concealing the artist's personality, emotions, and working techniques.


The Académie held an annual, juried art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige. The standards of the juries reflected the values of the Académie, represented by the highly polished works of such artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel. Some younger artists painted in a lighter and brighter manner than painters of the preceding generation, extending further the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school. They were more interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating scenes from history. Each year, they submitted their art to the Salon, only to see the juries reject their best efforts in favour of trivial works by artists working in the approved style. A core group of young realists, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, who had studied under Charles Gleyre, became friends and often painted together. They soon were joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin.


In 1863, the jury rejected The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) by Édouard Manet primarily because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic. While nudes were routinely accepted by the Salon when featured in historical and allegorical paintings, the jury condemned Manet for placing a realistic nude in a contemporary setting.[3] The jury's sharply worded rejection of Manet's painting, as well as the unusually large number of rejected works that year, set off a firestorm among French artists. Manet was admired by Monet and his friends, and led the discussions at Café Guerbois where the group of artists frequently met.
After seeing the rejected works in 1863, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was organized. While many viewers came only to laugh, the Salon des Refusés drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art and attracted more visitors than the regular Salon.
Artists' petitions requesting a new Salon des Refusés in 1867, and again in 1872, were denied. In the latter part of 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley organized the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs ("Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers") for the purpose of exhibiting their artworks independently. Members of the association, which soon included Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas, were expected to forswear participation in the Salon. The organizers invited a number of other progressive artists to join them in their inaugural exhibition, including the slightly older Eugène Boudin, whose example had first persuaded Monet to take up plein air painting years before.[5] Another painter who greatly influenced Monet and his friends, Johan Jongkind, declined to participate, as did Manet. In total, thirty artists participated in their first exhibition, held in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar.


The critical response was mixed, with Monet and Cézanne bearing the harshest attacks. Critic and humorist Louis Leroy wrote a scathing review in the Le Charivari newspaper in which, making wordplay with the title of Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), he gave the artists the name by which they would become known. Derisively titling his article The Exhibition of the Impressionists, Leroy declared that Monet's painting was at most, a sketch, and could hardly be termed a finished work.
He wrote, in the form of a dialog between viewers,
Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.


The term "Impressionists" quickly gained favour with the public. It was also accepted by the artists themselves, even though they were a diverse group in style and temperament, unified primarily by their spirit of independence and rebellion. They exhibited together albeit with shifting membership eight times between 1874 and 1886.
Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro may be considered the "purest" Impressionists, in their consistent pursuit of an art of spontaneity, sunlight, and colour. Degas rejected much of this, as he believed in the primacy of drawing over colour and belittled the practice of painting outdoors. Renoir turned against Impressionism for a time in the 1880s, and never entirely regained his commitment to its ideas. Édouard Manet, despite his role as a leader to the group, never abandoned his liberal use of black as a colour, and never participated in the Impressionist exhibitions. He continued to submit his works to the Salon, where his Spanish Singer had won a 2nd class medal in 1861, and he urged the others to do likewise, arguing that "the Salon is the real field of battle" where a reputation could be made.


Among the artists of the core group (minus Bazille, who had died in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870), defections occurred as Cézanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley, and Monet, abstained from the group exhibitions in order to submit their works to the Salon. Disagreements arose from issues such as Guillaumin's membership in the group, championed by Pissarro and Cézanne against opposition from Monet and Degas, who thought him unworthy.[9] Degas invited Mary Cassatt to display her work in the 1879 exhibition, but he also caused dissention by insisting on the inclusion of Jean-François Raffaëlli, Ludovic Lepic, and other realists who did not represent Impressionist practices, leading Monet in 1880 to accuse the Impressionists of "opening doors to first-come daubers". The group divided over the invitation of Signac and Seurat to exhibit with them in 1886. Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions.
The individual artists saw few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance. Their dealer, Durand-Ruel, played a major role in this as he kept their work before the public and arranged shows for them in London and New York. Although Sisley would die in poverty in 1899, Renoir had a great Salon success in 1879. Financial security came to Monet in the early 1880s and to Pissarro by the early 1890s. By this time the methods of Impressionist painting, in a diluted form, had become commonplace in Salon art.

Impressioist Manet

Édouard Manet'sthe eldest son of an official in the French Ministry of Justice had early hopes of becoming a naval officer. After twice failing the training school's entrance exam, the teenager instead went to Paris to pursue a career in the arts. There he studied with Thomas Couture and diligently copied works at the Musée du Louvre.

The biennial (and later, annual) Parisian Salons were considered the most expedient way for an artist to make himself known to the public, and Manet submitted paintings to Salon juries throughout his career. In 1861, at the age of twenty-nine, he was awarded the Salon's honorable mention for The Spanish Singer . His hopes for continued early success were dashed at the subsequent Salon of 1863. That year, more than half of the submissions to the official Salon were rejected, including Manet's own. To staunch public outcry, Napoleon III ordered the formation of a Salon des Refusés. Manet exhibited three paintings, including the scandalous Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). The public professed to be shocked by the subject of a nude woman blithely enjoying a picnic in the company of two fully clothed men, while a second, scantily clad woman bathes in a stream. While critics recognized that this scene of modern-day debauchery was, to a certain degree, an updated version of Titian's Concert champêtre (a work then thought to be by Giorgione; Musée du Louvre, Paris), they ruthlessly attacked Manet's painting style.

Manet's submissions to the Salon of 1864 were again condemned by critics, who found errors of perspective in his Incident at a Bullfight (fragments of which are now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Frick Collection, New York) and a lack of decorum in The Dead Christ and the Angels . The latter picture, in particular, was denounced for its realistic touches, such as the cadaverous body of Christ and the seemingly human angels. It was argued that the painting lacked any sense of spirituality; the figure of the battered Christ was said to more closely resemble the body of a dead coal miner than the son of God.

Despite his efforts, Manet's modern scenes remained a target of criticism throughout the decade. Olympia (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was considered the most shocking work in the 1865 Salon. Its debt to Titian's Venus of Urbino (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence) only accentuated the wide gulf of public opinion vis-à-vis a reclining nude woman as subject matter: a goddess was perfectly acceptable, but a contemporary prostitute awaiting her client was not.

Dejected by the critical response to his art, Manet traveled to Spain in August 1865. His interest in Spanish culture already had been apparent for years, with paintings such as The Spanish Singer, Mademoiselle V, and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo. He garbed his studio models in Andalusian costumes and outfitted them with Spanish props, often in fanciful ways. For example, the left-handed model of The Spanish Singer (49.58.2) presses on nonexistent chords of a guitar strung for a right-handed player. A stereotypical Spanish still life rests next to his espadrille-clad feet. Similarly, Victorine Meurent, the female model of Mademoiselle V , is shown wearing men's clothes, as well as shoes that are impractical for a bullfighting ring. Stylistically, many of these paintings reveal a clear debt to the art of Velázquez and Goya.

After being rejected from the Salon of 1866 and learning that he was to be excluded from the Exposition Universelle of 1867 as well, Manet grew anxious to find an audience for his art. He used his inheritance to construct a pavilion across the street from one of the entrances to the Exposition Universelle. Inside were fifty of his pictures, including several large works now in the Metropolitan's collection: A Matador (29.100.52) and Young Lady in 1866 (Woman with a Parrot) (89.21.3). Earlier that year, the artist's first champion, Émile Zola, had published a lengthy and glowing article about Manet. "The future is his," Zola proclaimed. He insisted that the much-maligned Déjeuner sur l'herbe (which was included in Manet's 1867 exhibition) would one day hang in the Louvre. Zola proved prophetic; it took almost seventy years, but the painting entered the collection of the Louvre (now Musée d'Orsay) in 1934.

By all accounts, the sociable Manet was on good terms with many of his peers. He had met Edgar Degas in 1859, when they both copied paintings at the Louvre; he befriended Berthe Morisot, who eventually married his younger brother; and he spoke with countless others during the now-famous evening gatherings at the Café Guerbois. His first encounter with Claude Monet was strained due to Manet's belief that Monet was copying his style in "despicable pastiches," then signing them with a signature too close to Manet's own. After the confusion was cleared, the men became close, as is obvious in a work such as The Monet Family (1976.201.14). Boating (29.100.115), also painted during the summer of 1874, records a moment when Manet, Monet, and Auguste Renoir painted together at Argenteuil, a suburb northwest of Paris. That spring, Degas, Monet, and Morisot were among the artists who exhibited together as the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (an event more commonly referred to as the first Impressionist exhibition). Manet declined invitations to participate in this or any of the seven subsequent exhibitions organized by the group. They nonetheless influenced one another and shared an interest in modern subjects, plein-air painting, bright colors (often purchased ready-made, in tube form), and visually arresting cropping (inspired by both photographs and Japanese prints).

When Manet's health began to deteriorate toward the end of the decade, he was advised to take a cure at Bellevue. In the summer of 1880, he rented a villa in that Parisian suburb, and he painted his last portrait of his wife, the Dutch-born pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, in the villa's garden The following spring, he won a second-class medal at the Salon for his portrait of Henri Rochefort (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), and in the fall he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He continued to work until his premature death in April 1883.

Within a year, a posthumous exhibition of 179 of his paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints was organized at the École des Beaux-Arts, the officially sanctioned art school. At least one critic commented on the irony of the location for an artist whose works had been ridiculed and refused by so many Salon juries. It seems unlikely that Manet would have minded. He himself wrote that he had "no intention of overthrowing old methods of painting, or creating new ones." The critic Louis Gonse viewed things slightly differently. "Manet is a point of departure, the symptomatic precursor of a revolution," he wrote. To this day, Manet is still considered by many art historians to be the father of modernism.

Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895) was an impressionist painter.

Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895) was an impressionist painter.

Born in Bourges, Cher, France into a successful bourgeois family who encouraged her and her sister Edma Morisot in their exploration of art!
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PRLog (Press Release) – Jun 21, 2009 – Born in Bourges, Cher, France into a successful bourgeois family who encouraged her and her sister Edma Morisot in their exploration of art, she demonstrated the possibilities for women artists in avant-garde art movements at the end of the 19th century. Once Morisot settled on pursuing art, her family did not impede her career.

By age 20, she met and befriended the important landscape painter of the Barbizon school, Camille Corot, who introduced her to other artists and teachers. She took up plein air techniques and painted small pieces outdoors either as finished works or as studies for larger works completed in the studio.

Morisot's first acceptance in the Salon de Paris came in 1864 with two landscape paintings, and she continued to show regularly in the Salon until 1874, the year of the first impressionist exhibition.

She was acquainted with Edouard Manet from 1868, and in 1874 she married Eugene Manet, Edouard's younger brother. She convinced Manet to attempt plein air painting, and drew him into the circle of acquaintance of the painters who became known as the impressionists. However, he never considered himself an impressionist or agreed to show with the group.

Morisot, along with Camille Pissarro, was one of only two artists whose work exhibited in all of the original impressionist shows.

Like Mary Cassatt, during her lifetime, Berthe Morisot was relegated to the category of "feminine" artists because of their usual subject matter — women, children, and domestic scenes. However, as a doctrinaire impressionist, Morisot painted what she saw in her immediate, everyday life. As a woman securely in the "haute bourgeoisie" she saw domestic interiors, holiday spots, other women, and children. Without exception, her subject matter shows the equivalent of that of her impressionist colleagues. Edgar Degas, the dandy male bourgeois, painted rehearsals of the ballet, horse races, and nude women in apartments (rather than studios). Claude Monet painted his garden, his children, and his neighbor's haystacks. Female impressionists painted their social milieu in a way consistent with the impressionist approach to subject matter.

Berthe Morisot died in Paris and was interred in the Cimetière de Passy.

Today, her paintings can sell for more than $4 million.

Starry night - Worlds' most popular painting

In September 1888, while van Gogh was staying in Arles, he executed a painting commonly known as Starry Night Over the Rhone and later he incorporated a pen drawing in a set of a dozen based on recent paintings. Van Gogh claimed to have a "terrible need for religion" when he painted Starry Night Over the Rhone.

In mid-September 1889, following a heavy crisis which lasted from mid-July to the last days of August, he thought to include this "Study of the Night"[3] in the next batch of works to be sent to his brother, Theo, in Paris. In order to reduce the shipping costs, he withheld three of the studies ("above-mentioned Poppies - Night Effects - Moonrise"). These three went to Paris with the shipment to follow. As Theo did not immediately report its arrival, Vincent inquired again,and finally received Theo's commentary on his recent work.
[edit]Subject matter
The center part shows the village of Saint-Rémy under a swirling sky, in a view from the asylum towards north. The Alpilles far to the right fit to this view, but there is little rapport of the actual scene with the intermediary hills which seem to be derived from a different part of the surroundings, south of the asylum. The cypress tree to the left was added into the composition. Of note, is the fact van Gogh had already, during his time in Arles, repositioned Ursa Major from the north to the south in his painting Starry Night Over the Rhone.
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As pointed out by Simon Singh in his book Big Bang, The Starry Night has striking similarities to a sketch of the Whirlpool Galaxy, drawn by Lord Rosse 44 years before van Gogh's work. The painting has been compared to an astronomical photograph of a star named V838 Monocerotis, taken by the Hubble in 2004. The clouds of gas surrounding the star resemble the swirling patterns van Gogh used in this painting.

Caravaggio, Michelangelo

Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 1571–1610, Italian painter. His surname, Caravaggio, came from his birthplace. After an apprenticeship in Milan, he arrived (1592) in Rome where he eventually became a pensioner of Cardinal Francesco del Monte for whom he produced several paintings, among them the Concert of Youths (Metropolitan Mus.). Most of Caravaggio's genre pieces, such as the Fortune Teller (Louvre), are products of his early Roman years, but after completing the Calling of St. Matthew and the Martyrdom of St. Matthew (c.1598–99; San Luigi de' Francesi, Rome), he devoted himself almost exclusively to religious compositions and portraiture. His violent temper and erratic disposition involved him in several brawls, and in 1606 he fled Rome after killing a young man in a duel. He spent the last four years of his life in Naples, Malta, Syracuse, and Messina. A revolutionary in art, Caravaggio was accused of imitating nature at the expense of ideal beauty. In religious scenes his use of models from the lower walks of life was considered irreverent. He generally worked directly on the canvas, a violation of current artistic procedure. His strong chiaroscuro technique of partially illuminating figures against a dark background was immediately adopted by his contemporaries, and although he had no pupils, the influence of his art was enormous.

Egon Scheile - The next Klimt!

Egon Schiele was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the predestined successor to Gustav Klimt, but died before he could fulfil his promise.

During his late adolescence Schiele's emotions were directed into an intense relationship with his younger sister, Gerti, which was not without its incestuous implications. When he was sixteen and she was twelve, he took her by train all the way to Trieste, where they spent the night in a double-room at a hotel. On another occasion, his father broke down the door of a locked room to see what the two children were doing in there together. In 1906 Schiele overcame the opposition of his guardian, his mother's brother, and applied for a place at the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, where Klimt had once studied. Perhaps those in charge scented a troublesome pupil - in any case they sent him on to the more traditional Academy of Fine Arts. Schiele duly passed the entrance examination, and was admitted at the age of sixteen. The next year he sought out his idol, Klimt, to show him some of his drawings. Did they show talent? 'Yes,' Klimt replied. 'Much too much!' Klimt liked to encourage younger artists, and he continued to take an interest in this gifted young man, buying his drawings, or offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstütte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Sezession. Schiele did odd jobs for them from 1908 onwards - he made designs for men's clothes, for women's shoes, and drawings for postcards. In 1908 he had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuberg.

In 1909 he left the Academy, after completing his third year. He found a flat and a studio and set up on his own. At this time he showed a strong interest in pubescent children, especially young girls, who were often the subjects of his drawings. Paris von Guetersloh, a young artist who was Schiele's contemporary, remembered that the establishment was overrun with them:

They slept, recovered from beatings administered by parents, lazily lounged about - something they were not allowed to do at home - combed their hair, pulled their dresses up or down, did up or undid their shoes ... like animals in a cage which suits them, they were left to their own devices, or at any rate believed themselves to be.
Already a superb draughtsman, Schiele made many drawings from these willing models, some of which were extremely erotic. He seems to have made part of his income by supplying collectors of pornography, who abounded in Vienna at that time. Schiele was also fascinated by his own appearance, and made self-portraits in large numbers. He impressed not only himself, but others with whom he came into contact. The writer Arthur Roessler, one of his staunchest defenders and promoters, described him thus:
Even in the presence of well known men of imposing appearance, Schiele's unusual looks stood out ... He had a tall, slim, supple figure with narrow shoulders, long arms and long-fingered bony hands. His face was sunburned, beardless, and surrounded by long, dark, unruly hair. His broad, angular forehead was furrowed by horizontal lines. The features of his face were usually fixed in an earnest, almost sad expression, as though caused by pains which made him weep inwardly. ... His laconic, aphoristic way of speaking created, in keeping with the way he looked, the impression of an inner nobility that seemed the more convincing because it was obviously natural and in no way feigned.