Away
from the City
Leisure
Images in Late 19th Century France
Paul
Signac “Saint Tropez: The Port” 1898
Berthe
Morisot “In the Garden” 1885
Julia
Schwartz
Art
History 16.2, Spring 2005
Professor O’Rourke
** ** **
Two color images of leisure amidst the bustle of industrialism of late-19th
century Paris are seen with Paul Signac’s 1898 color lithograph “Saint
Tropez: The Port” and Berthe Morisot’s 1885 oil painting “In the
Garden.”[1]
Though the images both offer forth a type of respite from the fervor that was
modern life, they differ greatly in subject and style. Each painting serves to
reinforce the personal style of its artist as it fits into the artists’
personal artistic development.
Both Signac and Morisot are generally considered Impressionists, though
Morisot eventually stopped exhibiting with the Impressionists, and Signac more
closely followed the school of his friend and mentor Georges Seurat, who greatly
influenced the school of pointillism. However, in “Saint Tropez: The Port”
and “In the Garden,” the Impressionist idea of the “impression” is
evident: neither piece has the classically accurate detail of works like those
by the French master Jacques-Louis David. Instead, there is just enough color,
form, and composition to give the impression of what is happening in the scene.
Like Claude Monet, Signac and Morisot give the least of information in these
works that the eye needs to perceive the image through the process of seeing.
These images don’t need polishing because with the basic forms and colors, the
eyes and brain can still decipher the image to gain the impression of what is
taking place.
With both of these color images, we see another important Impressionist
influence: the plein air philosophy.
Both “Saint Tropez: The Port” and “In the Garden” are outdoor scenes,
seemingly modeled after outdoor studies. Morisot’s painting could have easily
been completely crafted out of doors, and though the lithographic procedure that
Signac used with “Saint Tropez: The Port” would have required indoor
machinery, it is very likely that “Saint Tropez: The Port” was based upon
outdoor sketches. In fact, it is highly possible that Signac painted a
watercolor of the scene before producing the color lithograph, as he painted
many watercolors while in Saint Tropez and used them as “preliminary sketches
for his finished [paintings and prints].”[2]
Signac’s frequent use of watercolor is notable, as it demonstrates a
split from the rigid pointillist and divisionist style directly taught to him by
Seurat. Signac had been “a devoted follower of a scientific approach to color,
learning to divide colors into their primary components to improve the
luminosity of composition through optical mixing.”[3]
With “Saint Tropez: The Port,” both Signac’s early rigid style and later
ease with watercolor are seen simultaneously. It is important to note Signac’s
personal connection to Saint Tropez to understand his motives with “Saint
Tropez: The Port.” When Seurat died in 1892, Signac moved to the coastal port
town of
“Saint
Tropez: The Port,” is an excellent example of Signac’s change in medium and
his overall philosophy while in Saint Tropez. The port is depicted in a way that
is entirely peaceful. There are no references to modernization or
industrialization here; there are no people to serve as indicators of the time
period. The image is solely tranquil, focused on the water and the light from
the sky as it ripples across the water. The lithograph does make use of
Divisionist color theory, as only a few colors are used, but the pastel blue,
yellow, and peach, derived from the primary colors, are softened, presumably by
the influence of watercolor. And though the entire print is composed of
individual strokes clearly derived from pointillism, they are looser and larger
than the miniature dots seen in Signac’s earlier works, which much echo
Seurat’s technique in works such as “Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte.”
As the colors Signac uses stray farther from reality and forms become more
general in “Saint Tropez: The Port,” we can see how Signac and Saint Tropez
had a significant influence on the Fauvist artist Henri Matisse.
Berthe Morisot takes on her Impressionistic image
of leisure and respite much differently than does Signac. Where Signac was
mentored by Seurat, Morisot learned to paint from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot,
though later “abandoned all aspects of [his] teachings… and destroyed almost
all of her early work in favor a more unconventional and modern approach”[7]
greatly influenced by Édouard Manet, her brother-in-law. With Manet, she took
part in the first Impressionist gallery in 1874. She wasn’t as interested in
optical experiments with color as were the Impressionists and Signac, but
confined her use of color to a naturalistic framework.
Morisot is known for the use of “sketchy, pale
colors, and subject from her own experience including women… and children,”[8]
a style is epitomized by “In the Garden.” Very painterly and with pastel
colors, this scene features a family – a mother, her child, and a man who is
presumably the father. Morisot’s reliance on “spontaneous observation”[9]
is seen through her rapid brushstrokes. This painting, though a finished piece,
appears to be almost a study rather than the final work: none of the figures
have much detail, and there are wide swathes of color uninterrupted by detail.
However, the impression of the scene is clear: this family is on a picnic of
sorts in their garden.
Even with the low grade of detail, Morisot manages
to convey a sense of familial tension. The mother in the scene is not looking at
her child, who is trying very hard to get her attention, and the father is
gazing off into the distance, oblivious to their actions. Without detail,
Morisot has presented her viewer with the question of the modern family, asking
her to contemplate how changing gender roles might affect it. The family is
well-dressed and likely of the upper-class, as was Morisot herself. In many of
her paintings, Morisot creates a clear boundary which keeps women out of the
public world dominated by the flâneur. Since this is a private garden, the
women are not subject to any public social boundary, but a boundary still
exists: the women and men are split by silence. There seems to be no
communication within this scene, save the futile attempts of the little girl to
get her mother’s attention.
Though the attitudes of Signac’s “Saint Tropez:
The Port” and Morisot’s “In the Garden” are quite different, their loose
association with Impressionism and decision to paint scenes of leisure and
respite from the city tie the two artists together. Neither uses the classical
painting technique, instead using very painterly styles, with Signac using
small, short, precise brush strokes, and Morisot long, brushy ones. Both use the
bright, pastel colors of the Impressionists, and generally limit their palate to
a few colors; Signac is more limited in his color selection because he is
printing a lithograph and thus has to make a separate plate for each color, a
process far more complex and precise than Morisot’s use of oil paint. Where
Morisot uses very natural colors, relying mainly on the greens of the outdoor
vegetation, Signac’s colors are not as natural, for though the sky and water
are composed of very bright, similar pastel blues, and the buildings and boats
of yellows and peaches, their hues are exaggerated. The influence Signac has
Matisse is evident here, with Signac choosing colors based more on the feeling
they elicit than the accuracy of their depiction. Additionally, with his longer
brush strokes circling the clouds and his departure from a consistent
broken-brush technique, Signac evokes the Expressionist style of Van Gogh.
Though this scene is very calm, Signac is able to subtly convey emotion within
the setting through his use of color and his varying brush strokes.
Like many Impressionist pieces, both works
demonstrate a great interest in light. Signac shows the reflections of the boats
and buildings on the water as it ripples in what might be late-afternoon sun,
examining how the movement of the water distorts the reflections, and Morisot
uses a patch of sunlight coming through a break in the trees to enliven the
landscape and highlight the figures from behind. Both painters show a moment
during an overall action, but their scenes are not static: in “Saint Tropez:
The Port,” the water almost seems to ripple before the viewer as the sun beats
down upon it, and in “In the Garden,” one can picture the little girl
jumping up and down, tugging on her mother’s skirts. Finally, both Signac and
Morisot use a logical perspective and a natural scale, though neither makes it
strictly mathematical and rigid, as Neoclassicist painters would have: with
Impressionism, the perspective and scale is accurate enough to be believable,
but free enough to maintain a sense of fluidity and ease.
In “Saint Tropez: The Port” and “In the
Garden,” Paul Signac and Berthe Morisot use different but diverging techniques
to give life to peaceful refuges from the craziness and hectic nature of modern
Paris. Loosely Impressionistic, both are very painterly, demonstrating an
interest in color and the effects of light. Both follow the Impressionist method
of creating a work that gives the overall impression of a scene instead of every
detail about it, of creating a piece that is far clearer from a distance than up
close. These two works epitomize the artists who painted them, artists who,
though unconventional when they worked, created powerful works of art that
served to influence the art community around them and following them for years
to come.
[1]
Attributed to Morisot
[2]
C. Zacharias 2
[3]
C. Zacharias 1
[4]
C. Zacharias 3
[5]
www.FranceMiniature.com
[6]
C. Zacharias 2
[7]
www.Biography.com
[8]
www.ArtChive.com
[9]
www.Biography.com
** ** **
Works Cited
[No author.] Berthe
Morisot (1841-1895). ArtChive. 19 May 2005. <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/morisot.html>
[No author.] The
Impressionists: Berthe Morisot. A&E Television Networks. 19 May 2005.
<http://www.biography.com/impressionists/artists_morisot.html>
[No author.] Morisot,
Berthe. WebMuseum, Paris. 19 May 2005. <http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/morisot/>
Zacharias, Clelia (1). Arrival in
Zacharias,
Clelia (2). Reflection on the
Zacharias, Clelia (3).