I can cite only four of his paintings that I really enjoy seeing. Homer and His Guide, Return From the Harvest, Rest, and Meditation. That last is on the list mostly because a poster sized print of it was my first notice of his work.

I also have to disagree with the suggestion that Impressionism was the beginning of the end of Representational art. Just look at the works of the California Impressionists and the Soviet/Russian Impressionists. Their work seems very representational to me and the Soviet/Russian Impressionists carried on the Representational tradition throughout the 20th Century. I could say more but it would end up being a rant so I’d better stop here.

Thanks for another good posting.

He was a really great painter, everyone here would love to paint as good as him but not everyone (like myself) would like to adhere to his subjects, of course that was his low point & everyone with a brain can see that.

Right now, no one in this planet can paint half good as he did so he must`ve done something right!

That being said, I feel that there isn’t emotional depth to his work. It feels stoic; as personal as something in a glass storefront.

I have to disagree about Monet. He and other Impressionists, like Pissarro, Sisley and Bazille, did not dvelop the “Impressionist style” overnight and, though they were disdainful of the Academy, were not without training and considerable craftsmsnship. Several of them studied with Corot, in fact, and painted very much in that style in the early part of their career. It’s just that popular taste is such that we seldom see those works. (See my post on In The Forest of Fontainebleau.)

I maintain that the Impressionists were realists, just as much as Gustave Courbet, Claude Lorraine, or Rembrandt for that matter. It was their subject matter that was different. Instead of painting a bridge, haystack or group of trees, they were painting the light from those objects, and the effects of the intervening atmosphere; but they were painting what they saw.

The Impressioninsts were not called “painters of light” because their paintings were bright (many of them are quite dark in tone is you look at them with an open eye); they were called painters of light because that was their subject matter.

It was the so-called post-Impressionists, most notably Cezanne, that started us down the road to Modernism and the de-construction of the traditions of Western art. Impressionism is a branch of realism.

In fact, I would suggest that Monet was more of a “realist” than Bougereau, in that Bougereau’s works were more idealized and Monet’s more directly from nature.

Thanks for your comment. I was hoping for some responses with strong opinions.

I’ll disagree with you about Monet, however. He did receive classical training in the atelier of Charles Gleyre, but chose to move away from that style early on; unlike many postwar and current modernist painters who think that classical training is unecessary in their pursuit of the latest “ism”.