FREE ESSAY ON ROLE OF COLOUR IN IMPRESSIONISM

ROLE OF COLOUR IN IMPRESSIONISM

In this essay, I shall try to examine how great a role colour played in the evolution of
Impressionism. Impressionism in itself can be seen as a linkage in a long chain of
procedures, which led the art to the point it is today. In order to do so, colour in
Impressionism needs to be placed within an art-historical context for us to see more
clearly the role it has played in the evolution of modern painting. In the late
eighteenth century, for example, ancient Greek and Roman examples provided the classical
sources in art. At the same time, there was a revolt against the formalism of
Neo-Classicism. The accepted style was characterised by appeal to reason and intellect,
with a demand for a well-disciplined order and restraint in the work. The decisive
Romantic movement emphasized the individual's right in self-expression, in which
imagination and emotion were given free reign and stressed colour rather than line;
colour can be seen as the expression for emotion, whereas line is the expression of
rationality. Their style was painterly rather than linear; colour offered a freedom that
line denied. Among the Romanticists who had a strong influence on Impressionism were
Joseph Mallord William Turner and Eugene Delacroix. In Turner's works, colour took
precedence over the realistic portrayal of form; Delacroix led the way for the
Impressionists to use unmixed hues. The transition between Romanticism and Impressionism
was provided by a small group of artists who lived and worked at the village of Barbizon.
Their naturalistic style was based entirely on their observation and painting of nature
in the open air. In their natural landscape subjects, they paid careful attention to the
colourful expression of light and atmosphere. For them, colour was as important as
composition, and this visual approach, with its appeal to emotion, gradually displaced
the more studied and forma, with its appeal to reason. 
Impressionism grew out of and followed immediately after the Barbizon school. A
distinctive feature of the work of the Impressionists was the application of paint in
touches of mostly pure colour rather than blended; their pictures appeared more luminous
and colourful even than the work of Delacroix, from whom they had learned the technique.
To the modern eye, the accepted paintings of the salon artists of the day seem pale and
dull. Like the paintings of the Barbizon school, much of their painting was done
outdoors, in an attempt to capture the fleeting impression of the play of light at a
certain moment. The first Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1874. Prominent among the
Impressionists were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro,
Paul Cezanne, Eugene Boudin, and Gustave Caillebotte. 
Impressionism is thought to be '…the fruit of the scientific thought and research
of the nineteenth century' . One of the principles of the movement was that they
substituted the natural chiaroscuro of the colour that was based on the solar spectrum
for one that was based more on tones of black and white. It was this principle that has
affected painting ever since and most profoundly . It was accompanied by the shock of
discovering something new, although earlier paintings, such as those of the Barbizon
School had been heading towards the same direction. 
Most people, even today, relate light with the colour white and darkness with black.
Painters of the past have used black in an effort to dim a specific colour, and white to
order to lighten it. Scientific knowledge has left us with a complete understanding of
how the human eye works, and optics has given painters the opportunity to manipulate
light more effortlessly.
Thus, we have learnt that white light can be resolved into a scale of colours ranging
from violet to red, that black is the reversal of the colour due to its ability to absorb
all rays of colour, and that pure white and black exist only in theory . Even a surface
that appears to be white to us has the slightest tint of yellow, purple or red; likewise,
even the dimmest black has tints of colour in it.
It was the awareness of all these details that led the Impressionists into excluding
black from their paintings; discard earthly tones and deal almost solely with the seven
colours that comprise the solar spectrum. This change, that was about to turn into a
revolution in painting, was most profoundly exhibited in the depiction of shadows.
Painters of the past would have questioned the inclination of the colour grey towards
black or white; the Impressionists questioned whether it was a bluish, greenish, or
reddish grey. 
Colours were no longer thought of as dark and light, or as warm and cool. What interested
them was their relation to primary (yellow, blue) and complementary (green, orange,
indigo, and violet) hues . This view of nature was emphasised by Monet, Pissaro and
Renoir, although Delacroix had foretold Impressionism when he described the faces of two
Moroccan boys as '[the]…yellow-complexioned [one] had violet shadows; the
ruddy-faced one, green shadows.' 
The Impressionists shocked the public with the way they placed colour on their canvas,
though Watteau and Constable had already made use of broken colour to give variety to a
painting, and praised from Chardin and Reynolds . 
As we have seen, by the late nineteenth century much more was known about how colours
work together and influence one another. Monet uses primary and complementary colours in
Rose Path at Giverny. By piling the colours one on top of the other separately, Monet
makes them react to one another so that they appear to shimmer and sparkle. There is a
visual reference to perspective in the ochre and orange foreground, but essentially any
sense of the distance is carried by in the recessive blues and purples, which dominate in
the central section of the painting, and the reds at either side, which come forward. The
light areas seem to correspond to sunlight filtering through the foliage and flowers, and
the thick impasto technique plays an important role here. The paint has been built up
until it stands off the surface of the picture and is made to suggest the rich appearance
of texture created when light penetrates fitfully through a dense thicket. Unlike in
paintings that are abstract, Monet wants the spectator to be aware of the subject, so
that the imagination is stimulated to sense the atmosphere of what it must be like to
stand in a tunnel of roses. The viewer is aware constantly that he is looking at paint on
canvas, because the surface is so opaque.
In Manet's Concert in the Tuileries, the artist uses strong, natural light, which falls
directly on his figures. His use of white or pale-tinted ground strengthened the flat,
pale areas in the painting. These contrast with the liberal use of black, employed here
to portray the elegance of the dandies' dresses. Straight black was something that
academics were trying to avoid; its absolute presence disturbed gentle harmonies.
Ambroise Vollard recalls Pissarro's comments on Manet: "Manet was greater than us; he was
able to make light out of black" .
The uneven feel in Manet's work also stems from his use of colour. A surprising effect
greets the eye as it moves unexpectedly over the canvas from white to black shapes,
combined with primary hues. The figures are worked directly onto the white ground, with
little preparatory under painting. The sharp wet-in-wet application of colours with a
loaded brush contrasts with the thin translucent laying in of the background greens, and
this helps the eye to distinguish between foreground and background. The heads are
painted with lively brushstrokes in simple slabs of light and dark, which gives a dynamic
immediacy to the form and captures the feeling of being in the crowded scene, and the
mixed oranges provide a harmonizing contrast when put next to to the blues of the
dresses.
Van Gogh's understanding of colour came from the work of Delacroix and the
Impressionists. In The Sick-Ward of the hospital at Arles, the artist controls a range of
colours to create a very specific emotional impact on the viewer. He uses blue and gold
to recreate an atmosphere of melancholy and claustrophobia by the precise shades and
tints of the colours and the way he puts them together. There are reds and greens in the
ends of the beds and their bedspreads, but in a submissive way, so that the dominant
colours are a much colder series of blues. But the interesting point here is how the
artist could manipulate a similar range of colours to express a completely different
emotion.
By comparison, Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles produces an optimistic response. Blue is again
dominant in the picture; its is used in the walls, the doors, the jug, the reflection in
the mirror and the coats hanging on the wall in the background. The towel on the left is
tinted with green and a red line runs across it. There are oranges and golds and yellows
in the bed and picture frames and the red bedspread complements the window's dark green.
The optimistic response derives from the combination of all these colours.
As far as the new theory and newly found scale of colour was concerned, Impressionism was
the outcome of the optical research of the nineteenth century. One could say that
painting is about the expression of an emotion, but the visual language each artist uses
differs depending on his chronology. The idea of painting developing in a historical way
can appear to deny the notion that artists at different periods can be involved with
similar concerns but carry them out according to the visual language of their time.
Impressionism is the exact opposite to ancient Greek art with its well-defined lines and
extreme clarity. The sense of the boundless in Monet's work led some critics to describe
his work as 'pantheist art' . Pantheism, one could say, is consistent with scepticism and
philosophic doubt. Greek religion was fixed and boundless; Impressionism was vague and
boundless, and an art that expressed the prevailing thought and scientific progress of
its time.