Impression

Painting quickly in France 1860–1890

National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing
1 November 2000 – 28 January 2001

This exhibition adroitly focuses on a key thirty-year period when the technological progress experienced in later 19th Century Europe brought revisions in the way artists perceived movement and light. Such Impressionists as Van Gogh and Manet chose ordinarily, daily incidents, such as reading a magazine, or newspaper, or sporting activity, to convey the sense of the moment, of the ephemeral, of the inkling of an eye.

Late Pissarro is here deployed tactically to demonstrate "Boulevard Montmartre at Night", for example. Degas was a master at capturing the vital moment, or split second, of drama or sudden significance. This new awareness and connoisseurship of the fleeting moment in paint sent shock tremor through the traditional academic and institutional cohorts of the art and museum world of the 1860s and 1870s.

Camille Pissarro. The Boulevard Montmartre at Night Detail of a lamp and carriages

   Behind all this loomed the growing importance of the camera as a means of communication and hence of artistic expression. The shutter speed became a metaphor for painting, which could encapsulate essentials, and eliminate others, beyond the resource of the camera. This was the survival of painting, nothing less, that was at stake, and secured against all odds, by the Impressionist wave of this period, successfully conveyed in this exhibition.