By Krisztian Kos

In 1871, one of the most famous Impressionist painters, Claude Monet, moved to the small town of Argenteuil on the bank of the Seine a few kilometers from Paris. Argenteuil was known for its boating events, its scenic promenade along the river, its lively thoroughfares and streets, but also for its modernity which was embodied by its railway and the factories nearby. Its quiet and humble modernity attracted many famous Impressionist painters like Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and Gustave Caillebotte. They depicted Argenteuil under many different conditions, illustrating the French life of leisure in the countryside. They painted outdoors, referred to as plein air painting, sometimes started and finished their works among nature. Over the next seven years, Argenteuil would play a key role in the development of the Impressionist movement.

What was Impressionism all about? These paintings are characterized by small, quick brushstrokes and extensive uses of many different colors. The subject matter focused on landscapes and lives of leisure in the countryside. We see promenades with people strolling around, gardens checkered with light, and the Seine with its sailboats. The Impressionists were concerned with expressing the fleeting present, in its spontaneity and ephemerality. Instead of seeking an ideal experience of their surroundings, they highlighted the beauty latent around us. They highlighted the texture of experience and the impermanence of life.

This philosophy separated Impressionism from the traditional art canon. The Salon, a renowned art exhibition funded by the French government, rejected the works of the Impressionists, as critics diminished them to sketches and incomplete works, not grasping their complex compositional elements. After their first show in 1874, Impressionists slowly started a revolution in painting.

Gustave Caillebotte, *The Promenade at Argenteuil* (1883)

Impressionism changed the way viewers engage with art. Throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods that preceded the 19th century, most paintings were charged with references to the Bible, mythology, classical history, and to the social conditions of the time. Artworks were appreciated in their contexts. This meant the viewer required knowledge of the context behind artworks to fully engage with them. Not knowing the biblical figures or historical events depicted made it hard for viewers to have complete, rewarding experiences engaging these artworks. Eventually, as landscape paintings and genre paintings, especially the depiction of everyday lives by Dutch masters in the 17th and 18th centuries, gained popularity, background knowledge became less necessary to understand art. Allegories, symbols, and morals remained.

The Impressionist movement came with a new formalist approach to art. The appreciation of a painting derived from properties like structure, layout, and color. Viewers didn’t need an understanding of the history and origin of the artwork to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the paintings. Context could enhance the experience but was no longer essential for a rewarding aesthetic experience.

The Impressionists took the formalist conception of art further than their predecessors and contemporaries. They focused on the phenomenological qualities, capturing the experience. They expressed how they saw the world through the appearances the world gave them. Instead of embellishing their artworks, they aimed at capturing their environments as they received them. They did this by playing with light, one of the core features of Impressionism. Often elusive, light often gave an ineffable quality to scenes in a way poetry could not put into words. In Argenteuil, the subtle interaction of light, landscape, and flora gave an intimacy to their paintings. Texture was also a hallmark quality of Impressionist paintings.

Monet’s The Garden, painted at his home in Argenteuil, is a prime example of how light imbues a scene. We encounter the flora brimming with life, and two women sitting in the grass, surrounded by waving trees and bushes all around. The pastel colors of their clothes and the pink leaves are charged with movement. The blue sky’s wispy clouds soak up the sunlight to create harmony. Sunlight pours out of the sky, illuminating two lilac trees and bring alive the conversation of the two women. Beams of light fall in spots behind the lilac trees to bring out leaves from the cool shade of the verdure. These vibrant colors radiate the warmth of a calm summer afternoon, leaving one wanting nothing more than to sit and talk in the grass, surrounded by the quiet of Argenteuil.

Impressionists embraced temporality as a fundamental aspect of life. They sought to represent the world around them as they experienced it. Movement therefore played a central role in their paintings. Instead of timelessness, they welcomed a transient and momentary quality of life. Impressionists dove into the everyday, where each moment was more fleeting than the next. Through depicting ordinary events on the banks of the Seine, the viewer was invited to discover the implicit parts of their world, those they don’t ordinarily pay any attention to. By stressing the dynamism of the everyday, Impressionists brought together beauty and ephemerality.

The scene in Renoir’s Sailboats at Argenteuil is charged with movement. The main boat sways back and forth, its sails and mast taking up most of the painting. Surrounding sailboats and a canoe drift on the water in front of undulating trees on the shore. The reflections of boats in the water dissolve the autonomy they might have otherwise had, while their sails belly in and out in the summer breeze. Spirited ducks in the foreground are captured by a few measured brushstrokes, much like the moving water as they splash around. Nothing is static in this scene. Renoir manages to depict energy bordering controlled chaos. He accepts the fleetingness of life by placing his trust in the dynamic sailboats and ripples in the water. He does this all on an ordinary summer afternoon, on the banks of the Seine.

Auguste Renoir, *Sailboats at Argenteuil* (1874)

It was in Argenteuil where some of these key features of Impressionism were born. A purely empirical approach to painting and embracing the fleetingness of life are the defining characteristics of this artistic movement. Aiming to encapsulate the present as they experienced it, the Impressionists conveyed their world to viewers without the interference of extraneous factors. Impressionists imparted the undiluted beauty of nature and humanity to the viewer, inviting them to bask in the golden light of an Argenteuil summer afternoon.

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