Impressionism: A Revolution in Visual Art

Between the late 1860s and the early 1870s, several closely associated artists began reimagining the pictorial field and discovering new modes of representing their experiences of modern life. Looking to recently established methods of painting outdoors for inspiration, each of these artists pursued the ideal of “optic truth,” applying paint in experimental manners to capture distinct moments of visual perception on their canvases. Whether depicting the effects of changing light and atmospheric conditions or some idiosyncratic gesture or facial expression, they analyzed each motif that rendered it justly and logically.

Women Models in Degas’s France

Although France was established as a republic in the 1870s, women remained deprived of the civil rights that were accorded to men under this new liberal regime. They were excluded from most professional careers and broadly categorized as either “virtuous” wives and mothers or as women of “ill repute”. In his work Degas represented women with a preponderant frequency. The notion of femininity revealed by Degas’s works was generally confined by the stereotypes prevalent in the bourgeois milieu of this time: delicate opera dancers, timid shop girls, and impoverished women sketched exploitatively in their nudity.

Gauguin, Sérusier, and the School
of Pont-Aven

As Paul Gauguin’s work and reputation attracted growing attention from the art world, younger painters from Paris began gathering around him in Pont-Aven around 1888. One of these young apprentices was Paul Sérusier, whose philosophical reflections on the relationships between form and color elicited a new poetic dimension from his landscapes of the region. On the occasion of the reinstallation of the Mellon Galleries in 2021, VMFA acquired a spectacular painting by Serusier, The Three Pond Cottage at Le Pouldu, in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Mellon’s generous support of the museum.

The Fauves: A New Spectrum for
Modern Art

A group of young artists rejected Impressionist principles instead deriving their radical approaches from overlooked Post-Impressionist painters like Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne. They painted with a transgressive exploration of color for color’s sake and an apparent disregard for the ordinary rules of composition. Describing the bust of a child exhibited amid paintings by Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, and Marquet, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote, “It’s Donatello amongst the fauves (‘wild beasts’),” giving name to a new revolutionary movement in art: Fauvism.

Bonnard, Vuillard, and Vallotton: After the Nabis Vision

In 1888, a group of young artists in Paris aimed to replace naturalistic representation with personal and visionary interpretations of subjects leading to this collective calling themselves Nabis (which in Hebrew means “prophet” or “inspired”) After a decade of active collaboration, original members Bonnard, Buillard, and Vallotton parted from the group and began to use line and color to express the animated environments of modern Paris or to re-create domestic interiors and scenes of family life. These discrete themes allowed them to elaborate their art’s ornamental vocabulary, integrating painting itself as fundamentally decorative.

Cubism: Reconstituting the Figurative

From around 1907 until 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque worked closely together to develop the essential principles of a new and radical approach to representation. Instead of relying on conventional rules of perspective to achieve illusionist imitations of nature, they were decomposing forms into fragmented geometrical planes to convey their subjects from multiple viewpoints. Responding to a group of paintings that Braque exhibited in 1908, the critic Louis Vauxcelles (1870–1943) understood their subjects as having been reduced to “geometric outlines, to cubes.” His cursory evaluation eventually led to this new figurative tendency being called Cubism.

“The painter who trusts his eye alone is deceived”: The Mature Work of Raoul Dufy

Dufy began taking evening painting classes in his hometown of Le Havre, France, when he was eighteen. Five years later, he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts on a scholarship. After encountering the work of Matisse and other Fauvist painters at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, Dufy spent the next few years exploring relationships between striking colors and heavily contoured forms. His subsequent works emulated the more subdued palette and boldly structured figures in Cézanne’s work, until his former classmates Othon Friesz (1879–1949) and Georges Braque introduced him to the principles of Cubism. 

Haseltine's British Campion Animals

In 1925, American sculptor Herbert Haseltine was granted a commission to create a series of sculptures for the Field Museum, formerly the Museum of Natural History in Chicago, from philanthropist Marshal Field (1893-1956). The artist proposed a group representing prize-winning animals from leading agricultural shows in Great Britain. Haseltine worked on the set until 1933, titling the nineteen completed works British Champion Animals. Owing to his boundless admiration for British country life, Paul Mellon purchased the entire series from the Field Museum in the mid-1980s and donated them to VMFA.

Portraits Of Horses

The tradition of horse portraiture emerged in Europe early in the 18th century, principally in Great Britain. These paintings were intended to validate the merit and value of racehorses bred and raised for members of the aristocracy. They amounted to an entirely new pictorial genre that derived from 17th-century battle scenes, landscape painting, and the iconographic conventions of equestrian portraits.

In Pursuit

The Paul Mellon Collection of sporting art is particularly rich in European hunting scenes dating from the early 18th century until the beginning of the 20th century. Since the Middle Ages, hunting was one of the principal activities by which Europe’s elite classes, and especially the aristocracy, defined their social standing. Hunting on horseback was an assertion both of a landowner’s authority over the land itself as well as his dominance over its human and animal inhabitants. Hunting for sport also served as a form of physical exercise that was considered respectable for gentlemen during times of peace.

Horses and Courses

Owing to a long history of royal endorsement that began in the early 17th century, horse racing was referred to as “the sport of kings” and competitive racing became a prestigious pastime for members of the aristocracy. The tradition of sporting art was established when owners and breeders began to commission portraits of their winning horses to commemorate their victories. In Europe and America, prominent artists such as John Wootton (ca. 1682-1765), Edward Troye (1808-1874), Edgar Degas (1834−1917), and Sir Alfred Munnings (1878−1959) made important contributions to the genre of sporting art.

For more opportunities to learn, please visit The Friends of Sporting Art.