Page 133 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 133/206
Claude Monet: Impression, Sunrise 1872
Monet had spent a year in England at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and he had seen the works of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. In 1872, back in France, he made several sketches of the harbour of his home-town Le Havre. One of these (above) is entered into an exhibition of work by Degas, Sisley, Renoir and Pissaro; and Manet - asked to give this painting a title for the catalogue, calls it Impression, Sunrise. he recalls: “They wanted a title for the catalog; it couldn’t really pass as a view of Le Havre, so I answered: “Put down Impression.” Out of that they got impressionism, and the jokes proliferated....” (interview with Maurice Guillemot for La Revue Illustrée 1898). Impression, Sunrise was the first Impressionist painting.
This was a definitive shift in thinking. It marked a further move beyond realism of subject matter (pioneered by Courbet, Millais etc) towards realism of form - painting what we actually see and construct from our senses and our memory. So attuned was Monet to this aim of expressing his aesthetic responses by painting direct from nature (en plein air), that he adopted the practice of making paintings of the same scene again and again, in order to capture the subtle seasonal gradations and the more apparent modulations of light and of weather. From the age of 5, Monet lived in Le Havre (the location of Impression, Sunrise), and this is where he learned his basic drawing technique and oil-painting methods and outdoor painting (from Jacques-François Ochard and Eugene Boudin). So he knew his subject matter intimately, painting Impression Sunrise would have been what Gauguin later called ‘abstractions’ - painting from memory - or at least an amalgam of observation and memory.