Royal Academy: From Paris – A Taste for Impressionism

18^th July

This exhibition at the Royal Academy is from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute’s collection of Impressionism paintings with some pre Impressionists such as Corot.  (http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/from-paris-a-taste-for-impressionism/)

The exhibition is themed round Still Life, Landscape, Genre Painting, Female Form, Portraiture and Orientalism.  The exhibition is on the Sackler Wing of Galleries level (2) and can be reached by lift (elevator).  My friend Stephen took me as he had been the day before and knew the type of painting that I could make out. 

On checking the audio desk I asked what audio descriptions were available.  Daria checked and gave me instructions for the 6 themed audio described pictures and told Stephen where to look out for them.  These are numbered on the audio set as 51 to 56.  I have prefixed the relevant paintings with VI 51-56; these are not the same as catalogue numbers.   Instructions on the operation are found on 555. 

I had found that in the Zoffany these audio descriptions are a guide to the dimensions, geometry of the painting and some shapes, colours and figures or landmarks.  This describes the content of the painting and the guide will lead on to other information.  The numbers of the contextual information can also be heard if a friend tells you the number. 

For example I listened to VI #51 which was a description of some roses in a glass vase by Manet.  I mentioned to Stephen that there was not a wasted adjective in the description and that I knew that the leaves had not been cut from the rose stems in the transparent vase.  I could not see this detail though could make out the vase and roses themselves.    There are many still life compositions and some of them were quite clearly lined, for example a dish of apples forming a pyramid above a horizontal line formed by a table. 

Landscape:

There are some very beautiful Corot landscapes and I liked them all.  His trees and skylines have been noted before (http://profwhitestick.blogspot.com/2012/02/corot-peasants-under-trees-at-dawn.html) The cityscape of Rome with the view of St Peters on the left and Castel Sant’Angelo on the right had been painted many years after Corot had visited Rome.  Corot had painted with new (at the time) oil paints in tubes in the open air.  (I had noticed a sketch of a view of Rome at the Courtauld Gallery on 12^th July)

VI #52 Landscape by Sisley (The first Sisley I have understood since I lost my sight) Sisley landscapes have been difficult for me and I had more or less accepted that it was impossible for me to make out much.  With a close listen and another phial of eyedrops I could make out much more. 

VI #53  A beautiful picture of the cliffs at Etretat by Monet.   I have heard these cliffs described in novels before (Jonathon Coe’s Closing the Circle).  The coastline is dimly familiar from the past on sailing by this on a ferryboat/ship.  The scene is of a cliff with much erosion leaving an arch and an offshore stack.  Resembles the Old Man of Hoy, Orkney but less dramatic.  The colours are striking and the lines quite clear.

This exhibition was a real delight and I bought the catalogue and a selection of postcards at the end of the visit.  Stephen and I had lunch at the gallery.  Postcards bought include:

The Cliffs at Etretat by Claude Money

Moss Roses in a Vase by Edouard Manet

Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome by Camille Corot

Bathers of the Borromean Isles by Camille Corot

Portrait of Madame Monet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Prof Whitestick outside Royal Academy

showing catalogue for "From Paris - a taste for Impressionism"

behind is a banner for the exhibition

The following are notes which Stephen took down and a sighted friend deciphered and typed up.  We both crosschecked the titles and artists.  In contrast, the above three descriptions of paintings were from my memory.  This will illustrate how an image can remain in memory after a description has been made.  Also, in checking the following notes, the PDF guide, which can be downloaded from the Royal Academy website, can be useful in checking captions.  I am grateful to Kate Horbury from Access and Learning at the Royal Academy for alerting me that the Clarke exhibition guides had just gone up on the RA website.  http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/learning/access-and-communities/large-print-gallery-guides-and-labels,1420,AR.html.

Clark at RA

#65

Renoir

Apples in a Dish 1883

#32

Henri Fantin-Latour

Roses in a Bowl and a Dish

Table on diagonal, full double roses very delicately painted

#57

Renoir

Peonies 1880

Flowers vigorously painted and much less detail than previous roses

#31

Manet

Moss Roses in a Vase

VI #51

Clear description: dimensions, colours, content, no wasted adjective, no music, context given #1 (audio channel)

Landscape

#3

Camille Corot

Road by the Water

#1

Camille Corot

Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome

#6

Constant Troyon

Gooseherd 1850-55

#15

Claude Monet

Spring in Giverny 1890

Very ‘high key’ use of colour with subtle contrast, difficult to see

#25

Camille Pissarro

Saint-Charles, Eragny 1891

#19

Alfred Sisley

Banks of the Seine at By

VI #52

Avenue of Trees described, water + boat, geometry and dimensions.  First Sisley I have ever understood.

#13

Claude Monet

The Cliffs at Etretat

VI #53

Rock structures + beach + water, sky, lighting, reminds me of Caithness/Orkney

Old Many of Hoy

#16

Gustave Caillebotte

The Seine at Argenteuil 1892

#23 & #26

Pissarro

Industrial + boat scenes

I really like these Pissarro paintings.  I admired one of his paintings of a steam engine in Dulwich which I saw at the Courtauld a few days before.

Genre Scenes

#44

Giovanni Boldini

Crossing the Street

Carriage with driver, visible woman, lifting skirt, street scene Paris, very nice

#45

another Boldini painting

#37

Degas

Horses

#36

Degas

Dancers in the Classroom, 1880

Reminds me of National Gallery Metamorphosis

#56

Renoir

A Box at the Theatre, 1880

Audio context points out that top right x-ray shows man observing, subsequently painted over.  I want it!  Music score in hand

#53

Renoir

Girl with a Fan

These fans were Japanese and appear to be table tennis bats!  They appear in other paintings as these fans were particularly fashionable at the time.

#72

Pierre Bonnard

Women with a Dog

Check tablecloth (dress), middle right profile of woman (dog), 2 real women above, Japanese influence, flat pattern

(In trying to demystify the above notes, the woman’s dress is of a plaid tartan type and was fashionable in Paris at the time.  Queen Victoria had also made some Scottish patterns fashionable.  The profile of the dog had appeared to me to be a profile of a woman sitting at a table, whereas in reality the tablecloth was a dress and it was a dog who was reaching up to the lap of a woman.  This illustrates how first impressions can really lead one astray!)

#49

Renoir

Portrait of Madame Monet, 1874

Top to bottom triangle

Body and dress top left

Corner table tennis bat fans

VI #54

Flower in hair and foot on footstool

(I couldn’t see this, but learnt this from the audio description.  Even Stephen thought it may have been a ribbon rather than a flower.)

The Female Figure

#41

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Seated Nude

VI #55

White body + dark background, curved back, arms clasping knees, looks like a giant ampersand.

Portraits

#34

Degas

Self portrait, 1857-8

#47

Renoir

Self-portrait, c1875

#67

Renoir

Self-portrait, 1899

#40

Jean-Leon Gerome

The Snake Charmer

VI #56

Music Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune by Debussy

Other reality

This is an example of Orientalism gone mad.  The artist took bits of Istabul, bits of North Africa and let his imagination go wild.  This painting was apparently a favourite of the Clarke family and had been in the family’s possession for a long time.  I didn’t like it, but I’ve never liked scenes from the highlands of Scotland painted by some Victorians around the same time.

You can listen to curator Richard Rand discussing some of the works on display:

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-magazine/blog/video-from-paris-a-taste-of-impressionism-paintings-from-the-clark,249,BAR.html

ProfWhitestick‏@ProfWhitestick

@RoyalAcademy With a detailed audio description of the Manet Roses in glass vase I could make out so much more. I can smell them.

AntennaInternational‏@AntennaIntl

@ProfWhitestick We are pleased that the audio guide for "From Paris A Taste of Impressionism" exhibition @royalacademy was useful!

ProfWhitestick‏@ProfWhitestick

@antennaintl @royalacademy In my case I could smell Manet's roses and the Renoir descriptions were good.

Royal Academy‏@royalacademy

@profwhitestick We're delighted that the @AntennaIntl audio guide brought #RAFromParis to life for you!

ArtWord‏@ArtWordMari

Fabulous! RT @ProfWhitestick: With a detailed audio description of the Manet Roses in Vase I could make out so much more. I can smell them."

Camille Pissarro: Paris at Night - tactile representation of Impressionist art

The National Gallery’s Art through Words series opened 2012 with a painting by the Impressionist Camille Pissarro of  a Parisian street scene at night and during the rain. 

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/camille-pissarro-the-boulevard-montmartre-at-night 

An Impressionist painting in the dark sounds a tall order for people of the visually impaired community, but the National Gallery team met the challenge.  There were around a dozen visually impaired people and with companions that made over 20 people altogether.  The speakers/describers were Sara and Linda. 

Sara introduced Pissarro with dates and background.  Pissarro was active politically and would also rent a room at the Hotel Rusie in Paris and do a series of paintings of street scenes, of which this was one. The painting is of a convenient domestic size being 22 inch by 26 and is in oil.  You can read about Pissarro at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro .

Sara had made a sketch of the painting which, with software and special paper, had been transformed into an A3 sized tactile drawing of the painting, with black and white contrast.  I found it difficult to disassociate a map from a painting at first. Sara then went through perspective lines. I was still having difficulty in getting the lines from my fingers to imprint the lines of the buildings and the lines of cabs in a busy street scene.  Eventually the penny dropped.  At this point we were given an A3 reproduction of the painting. 

The painting is very dark (it is Paris at night after all!) and reminded me of those postcards one could buy all over the world titled “x at Night”.  The lines of the building could be made out and there was a reference point in the form of a street lamp.  Electric lighting had been introduced in Paris but was still relatively new  when this painting was made. Pissarro was an Impressionist so the figures for people and other forms are suggested rather than drawn.  In my mind I still had the idea of a drawing and a plan rather than a painting. This may explain the questions I was asking about the height of the buildings and on which floor of the hotel Pissarro had painted the view. 

Pissarro has a lamp post with the light shining in a ‘figure foreground relation’,  which was painted giving the impression of a lit lamp and as part of a row of lamps.  These lamps give another perspective line.  In Sara’s tactile drawing, the lamp post is a key to the navigation of the painting itself, as is the intersection of the diagonal perspective lines based on a line of carriages on the bottom right hand diagonal, which continues through the vanishing point to the skyline on the top left.  The other diagonal line going from bottom left to top right is mainly an awning line going through the vanishing point to the skyline to the right. 

I find it easier to prop the tactile drawing on a wall and ‘read’ it with my fingers as one would read a tube map, for example, on the underground by following a specified underground line to give an indication of the route. 

One of the participants, with limited vision, thought that the tactile drawing had encouraged her to give the actual painting a second chance whereas the reproduction was too dark to discern much.  Another thought the perspective lines helped her to ‘frame’ the picture.  I was still a little confused and switched from ‘looking’ down on the painting to looking at the painting held vertically in my hand.  While I am quite happy painting with the canvas flat on a table I still ‘look’ at a painting as I would a book that is at an angle or in a vertical plane. So it was with the tactile drawing, which I now held in my left hand and touched the lines and features in my right.

We discussed the painting and the background of Paris which had been remodelled with the Hausmann designs and the wide boulevards which replaced the narrower streets. Topics such as the Paris Commune, cars and Hansom cabs, Franco Prussian War, Pissarro and conscription, the Dreyfuss Affair and the coming of electric lighting to both Paris and London were also raised.

The treat of these moments is when we move on through the National Gallery to the painting itself.  It looked a lot brighter than the reproduction suggested and the perspective lines were quite clear in my mind. Although we had been given close ups of the painting, no figures could be discerned apart from blobs of paint, which is what it is.  In passing this painting I would have recognised it and as Sara said it would look good above a mantelpiece.

Many thanks to Sara and Linda at the National Gallery for a lot of research and being able to answer all the questions which arose during the discussion. 

Postscript

On returning from the National Gallery I was invited to “watch” a TV programme about painting and the night.  This would have been just as good as the radio as all the subjects were either done in the dark or were about the “dark” The presenter Waldemar Januszczak was interesting though the subjects were tangential in that the subject continually changed and tended to religiosity. Nevertheless it was informative about candle light, gas light and even starlight.  I learned about the coming of gas and gas lighting in Arles and Van Gogh painting ‘Night Café. There were also some weird photographs about steam locomotives so I was entirely transfixed about that subject.  Not having a television I appreciated this programme though it added little to my knowledge on Paris by Night. The programme ended with the Rolling Stones ‘Paint it Black’ and this seems a suitable point to close.

Also, the Guardian published an article on a pavement artist who draws.  I find this aspect of street art fascinating and made a comment in the section in the Guardian.  This is the link to the paper's discussion with comments on perspective and perspective lines in drawing and painting: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/feb/01/3d-street-art  It fits in rather nicely with street scenes and my comments seemed to have been appreciated by late night Guardian bloggers.