Boyd, Jane E. (Author)
Lauded as pioneers of modern art, the French Impressionists portrayed many contemporary subjects, including the rapid growth of transportation networks brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley were among the artists who depicted the impact of industrialization on the natural environment, painting landscapes that featured railroads and iron bridges, products of the nineteenth century's new expertise in engineering. In recent Impressionist literature, such canvases have been viewed mainly as depictions of leisure and celebrations of technology. I revise this interpretation, instead proposing that the painters' approach to transportation engineering was marked by ambivalence and ambiguity. The Impressionists neither praised nor overtly criticized progress; rather, they attempted to map modernity by surveying and recording the effects of constant technological, social, and cultural change. Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley, the three artists discussed here, did not simply reproduce the scenes before them. The painters used a broad range of mass-produced visual imagery as a lens for examining the altered terrain, borrowing subjects, styles, and compositions from landscape prints, journalistic illustrations, engineering drawings and photographs, and even caricatures. I describe this process of synthesis in four chapters that focus on pairs or small groups of canvases from the early 1870s, a key period for the development of Impressionism. I argue that the resulting paintings of trains, railroad bridges, and suspension bridges question the rhetoric of progress embedded in the visual culture of the era. By adapting and altering the picturesque naïveté of early train prints, the exactitude and geometrical precision of engineering drawings and diagrams, or the perfectly rendered perspective of documentary photographs, the artists challenged those images' idealistic renderings of contemporary life. Their paintings are bold experiments in tackling difficult topics for the first time. This interdisciplinary study examines the complex relationships between nature and technology in the Impressionists' early transportation landscapes and reveals the innovative artistic techniques used to create those canvases. My analysis of the paintings in the context of nineteenth-century visual culture fills a gap in the literature on Impressionism and provides a fresh approach to both familiar and overlooked works of art. References References (559)
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