One of the most arresting works in the new Impressionism show at the National Gallery of Art isn’t by an impressionist. It’s Antonin Mercié’s Gloria Victis, a resplendent bronze modeled after one from the 1874 Paris Salon. In it, a fallen soldier is held aloft by an angel, his wings suspended in exquisite, sweeping arcs. Brilliantly fluid, the angel’s garment billows in great, cresting waves, his rust-tinged armor catching the light. The wilted soldier wields a blunted sword in one hand, the other poised tenuously, breathlessly, in mid-air.
The work is one of 130 in “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment,” a sumptuous show of the capital city’s splendors, born, as the best art is, in the wake of tragedy. Still reeling from the Franco-Prussian War and devastating civil strife, the artists in the show captured the world as they saw it: tender, thrilling and irresistibly charming.
At the cultural center of Paris was the official Salon, long considered the academic and even stuffy standard to the impressionists’ rebellious, effervescent pictures. But, as the current exhibition proves, the two weren’t entirely at odds. In fact, when the impressionists mounted their first show in April 1874 at the Boulevard des Capucines, they didn’t call themselves “impressionists,” a term coined by critics clamoring for a story.
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The story, as the National Gallery installation asserts, is of a group of artists who banded together to form a joint-stock company: the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs. Pooling their resources, they could stage an exhibition of their own, free of the strictures of the Salon’s jury but not hemmed in by a stylistic doctrine.
The first impressionist show “was not an ‘anti-Salon,’” as the “Paris 1874” curators note. In fact, a number of impressionists also showed at both venues, underlining the “porosity of the Salon-Société Anonyme divide,” as curator Mary Morton maintains.
Consider Edward Manet’s The Railway, a picture exhibited at the Paris Salon but infused with a thoroughly impressionistic spirit. (Manet famously never showed with the impressionists.) In The Railway, a woman looks up from her reading, a brown-speckled lapdog slumped over her arm. Her auburn hair falls in rich folds, set off by the twilight blue of her neatly cut dress. By her side, a girl, shimmering in a silken, blue-bowed gown, peers out at a train, its smoke diffuse, dreamlike. Change is afoot in the city, but it’s the onlookers, the sublimity of the everyday that holds Manet’s attention.
The impressionists, too, were more interested in life’s interludes than its grand, historical sweeps. Take Auguste Renoir’s The Theater Box, a lush picture of a woman, likely a well-to-do courtesan, in a gown of black-and-white folds, trimmed with lace and gathered with blush-pink roses. She looks out wistfully, her pale face and deep-blue eyes enlivened by a cascade of pearls and gilded binoculars, all the better to spy on her fellow patrons.
Berthe Morisot, one of only two women in the first impressionist exhibition, homed in delicately, impeccably, on those around her. In The Cradle, a baby is fast asleep under a gauzy, pink-tinged canopy. A woman looks on, her face feline, lost in a reverie all her own.
Morisot had an astute eye, so much so that her former teacher, Joseph Guichard, upon learning that his student’s work was mounted alongside Cezanne’s—the so-called ‘eternal reject,’ so unsuccessful was he at selling his paintings—penned a fiery note to the artist’s mother: “When I entered, dear Madam, and saw your daughter’s works in this pernicious milieu, my heart sank… The two canvases actually touch each other!”
The rancor carried over to the press, which took issue, most famously, with Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. Louis Leroy, a writer at the satirical magazine Le Charivari, seized on the picture, decrying its expanse of periwinkle blues and sea-foam greens, flecked with corals and dust pinks, as laughable, a spell of “madness.”
But not everyone was so dismissive. Of the sixty articles on the first impressionist show, only seven were pans. One judge of the show found the work “striking” and “never banal.” Another critic insisted that visitors to the exhibition will “come away with a whole new sensation.”
The impressionists were striking out on their own, grasping for something still out of reach. “Your hand in mine,” Monet once told Georges Clemenceau, “let’s help others always to see better.”
What they saw was the beauty of contemporary life: the delicacy of a ballerina awash in warm light, her gossamer-like tutu a blue-inflected cloud; or a family at the races, a maid breastfeeding amid the clamor swelling all around her.
The impressionists weren’t immune to hardship. In 1870, the Prussians destroyed the painter Alfred Sisley’s house. The next year, they ransacked Camille Pissarro’s studio. The latter was especially unlucky, losing his daughter, Minette, to lung disease days before the impressionists’ show opened in Paris.
In Hoarfrost, we see Pissarro’s mastery at work. The early morning scene, dappled with golden light, has a fineness of touch. A faint chill falls over the quiet, haunting field. That immediacy, the thrill of the here and now throbs in Jules Breton’s The Cliff, another marvel from the 1874 Salon. A girl, perched on a shallow rock, looks out over the luminous sea. It’s a glorious picture, of deep teal set against a muted cliff, waves coursing in the middle ground.
A tide was turning in the art world, too. The first impressionist exhibition forever changed how we see, but to view their work in isolation is to miss the thrust of their art. The impressionists weren’t moving through an idyllic world, and they weren’t the only skilled artists of their day.
What they were was daring. Their pictures don’t have the gloss of the Salon, but seeing them side by side brings to light the impressionists’ bravado, their belief in something new and marvelous, just across the way.
The impressionists, like Antonin Mercié, were born of the horrors of war, but rather than drape a soldier on an angel, they offered up a new kind of guardian, a new way of looking. With impastoed brushwork and lush palettes, they tapped into the vivid and the pulsating, into a world that still takes our breath away.
As the art critic Georges Rivière ventured in 1877, “The impressionists, with the power of their talent, will fight until they are completely triumphant, a moment that will not be long in coming.” Indeed, it’s already here.
“Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment” runs through January 19, 2025, at the National Gallery of Art.
