So, this is the Impressionist and Post-Impressionism room. I have the most wonderful job of curating
all these brilliant pictures.
You know when you walk into this room you get the impression of, light and colour everywhere
and the Impressionists were painting mainly out of doors.
This room was purpose built, you can see that it has quite low ceilings, and we have this
dado rail, so it creates a more intimate feel and it was also originally top-lit meaning
that there wouldn’t have been any artificial light at all. The paintings were shown in
natural light and that’s really how the they were intended. These pictures were produced
by the Impressionists out of doors, they were very keen on this idea of the what’s known
as the ‘Plein Air Aesthetic’ and this work by Camille Pissarro, which shows the
Kitchen Gardens at L'Hermitage, is a good example of a high-impressionist picture, painted
in 1874, which was the year of the first Impressionist exhibition.
He’s often known as the ‘Father of the Movement’ and he painted out of doors like
many of the Impressionists at a place called Pontoise which was north west of Paris. His
favourite subject matter was peasants working in the fields and you can see here a little
market garden where they’re gathering up the potatoes I think to take to the market
in Paris.
Now there’s a kind of myth surrounding Impressionism, people think it’s just painting quickly
on the spot and it is in certain cases and I can show you some examples of paintings
where really, they are startlingly unfinished, and this is what they were criticised for.
They painted on these very portable canvases this meant that they could go out into the
countryside with a canvas on their backs, just prop the aisle up anywhere and paint
in front of the motif.
But I think with Pissarro you can see this careful interest in geometry, he took the
picture, I recon, back to the studio and probably worked on it in the studio a certain amount
just to get the absolute right balance of colour and line.
I’d love to talk about this picture, when we’re talking about finish, this work, there
was a big debate about whether it was finished or not, it’s by Paul Cezanne, now if you
notice there are lots of areas where it’s unpainted and in fact an earlier dealer or
somebody who owned this picture, before it came into the gallery, was unsatisfied with
the unfinished appearance so they painted over the edges and we’ve only recently cleaned
it and now you can see it is Cezanne left it. And he deliberately used light, especially
in his later works, as part of the composition, so there’s this idea, this white under-painting
actually, which is the ground layer, actually creates this sense of luminosity, sense of
the light reflecting off the landscape.
So, many people think that the Impressionists were all a bunch of men, when in fact there
were two very well-known women artists associated with the movement. There were others in fact
which I won’t mention today but, we are very lucky to have this work by Berthe Morisot.
She was one of the most faithful members of the group, and she actually exhibited at nearly
all of the Impressionist exhibitions. It is much more typical of the kind of very free
technique that one associates with Impressionism and one can imagine her just sitting here
and finishing this off on the spot, very quickly. There’s no sense of her having taken it
back to the studio to work on and she’s even left all the kind of area around the
periphery unfinished.
Now this work is, I would say, one of the most important paintings in the collections
at the National Galleries of Scotland. We often describe Gauguin as a Post-Impressionist,
this is a term that was applied retrospectively, he didn’t think of himself as such but the
point is that there was a group of artists, so, Gauguin, Cezanne, Seurat and Van Gogh,
who all went, were kind of familiar with Impressionism, perhaps even exhibited with the Impressionists
and then moved beyond it. They moved towards a style of painting which is much more concerned
with painting ideas, kind of universal ideas, rather than just painting exactly what you
see in front of you.
So, this picture is completely ground-breaking, you can appreciate that I think if you look
at some of the other Impressionist works in this room and then you see what a radical
change Gaugin has made and the real change that he’s introduced here is that he’s
painting, not in front of nature, but painting largely from the imagination.
He actually wrote about this picture in a letter to Van Gogh and he said that this section
of the canvas is supposed to be ‘natural’, and this section, the upper right-hand corner
is ‘non-natural and out of proportion’. So deliberately, he gives the idea that this
is something which is very different from the rest of the canvas.
So, what’s happening in this picture is that we have a group of women, they are women
from Brittany, so they are wearing traditional Breton coiffes and a kind of uniform that
they wore, and they are listening to a sermon. So, this is called - the title of the painting
is - the Vision of the Sermon and it has a subtitle which is Jacob Struggling with the
Angel. Here you have the angel and Jacob in the top right-hand corner, and here on the
right you have a self-portrait by Gaugin and he shows himself here as the Priest who is
delivering a sermon about Jacob and the angel and the women are imagining that they can
see this whole kind of event from biblical history come to life. And the most startling
thing about this picture I think is this brilliant red colour, so the red, people have debated,
what’s the red? What’s it supposed to symbolise? And, in some ways it could symbolise
the wheat, the Buck wheat which grew in the area of Pont-Aven where this was painted,
it apparently glows red when it becomes ripe, but it could also just be used more symbolically
to represent the passion, the fervour, the religious fervour of these simple women.
So, we’re really lucky to have these two wonderful works by Van Gogh, who is one of
my absolute favourite artists, if not my favourite. The thing that probably strikes you when you
look at these two is how very different they are and you might be astonished to know that
they were only painted within a year of each other. So, it gives an idea of how quickly
Van Gogh was developing as an artist.
He had a very sort of varied career, which involved training as a Priest, teaching, working
as an art dealer, before he then decided to become a painter. And it was in the mid-1880’s
when he joined his brother, Theo Van Gogh, in Paris that he encountered Impressionism
and developed this style of paining.
So, this work was painted soon after Van Gogh left Paris. He spent a period in Paris in
the mid-1880’s because his brother Theo Van Gogh, who he wrote all the letters to,
was an art dealer there. He would have had the opportunity to encounter the Impressionists
but also some of the post-Impressionists such as Seurat, Georges Seurat, who had a strong
influence on him. And you can see how having previously painted in quite a dark pallet,
he lightened his canvases and he developed this touch which is almost like pointillism
but it’s a slightly more exaggerated version of it, and you can see how in the later works
this becomes even more kind of impassioned and the use of this very thickened pastel,
these thick layers of paint.
He unfortunately had this crisis where he famously cut off his ear and then admitted
himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy. So this painting is painted after, well during, during
that period when he was at Saint-Rémy and you can see, I mean people are very tempted
to interpret his work, in terms of his mental state at the time, it seems a much more kind
of passionate or impassioned work almost as if the trees are tumbling down the hill, everything
is kind of slightly out of control. These are Olive trees and he was able to see them
from his room in the asylum. But he always said in his letters that he only painted during
calm moments, so maybe it’s just that he’s developing this expressive style independently,
and he did - he was a great reader - he was very conflicted, even though he had this strong
religious upbringing - his father was a Pastor - he was very conflicted about his religious
beliefs and lot of this kind of, these conflicted feelings, I think are reflected in the sort
of tortured branches of the trees.
It’s a very tactile painting, you want to reach out and touch it, and you get the, if
you look closely you can see that he’s squeezed the paint directly from the tube. So, it’s
done in a very kind of raw and passionate way, and Van Gogh was very important for the
next generation of artist, he really influenced later movements such as Fauvism and Expressionism.
Here we have three works by Georges Seurat, who was the leading artist of the group now
known as the Neo-Impressionists. In this picture we see a development towards pointillism or
divisionism it’s sometimes known as and this is this technique of using dots of paint
and applying the pigment in these little dots. So, these artists were very interested in
colour theory.
The Impressionists themselves were also interested in colour theory but not in such a scientific
way. And, in particular, they explored the idea of complimentary colour. So, when you
look at Impressionist paintings you can often see that they were fond of juxtaposing colours
that are opposite on the spectrum, so in this painting you can see greens and reds.
The idea is that when you place colours opposite on the spectrum side by side you get a much
more kind of intense effect.