III.

Subjects

The impressionists specialized in landscape, informal portraits in a domestic setting, and still life—genres that before the 1870s had been regarded as of lesser importance than history painting. It was a major achievement of the impressionists to overturn this prejudice. Many impressionist landscapes depict unremarkable corners of nature with no obvious point of interest. Pissarro, for example, found the edge of a field and a partially obscured view of houses sufficient subject matter for Market Garden at L’Hermitage, Pontoise. Sisley, however, favored more conventionally picturesque sites, such as the village along a river bank in The Bridge at Moret-sur-Loing (1893, Musée d'Orsay). Morisot often painted women in indoor settings. The delicacy of her paint handling can be seen in The Cradle (1872, Musée d'Orsay), an intimate study of her sister and baby niece.

In 1863 French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire had called for a “painter of modern life.” The impressionists took up his challenge in paintings of the changing city scene: women wearing the latest fashions, the airy new streets and suburbs of Paris, modern modes of transportation (particularly the railway), and the riverside and seacoast resorts where Parisians spent their leisure time. Degas abandoned his early paintings of historical subjects in favor of the spectacles of modern life, heroic in their own way: jockeys at the racecourse, launderers and hatmakers at work, dancers in rehearsal or on stage. During the 1870s, the peak decade of French impressionism, these artists were never far from the fashionable crowds. Manet came closest to the impressionist style in such brightly colored depictions of modern leisure activities as Argenteuil (1874, Musée des Beaux Arts, Tournai, Belgium), a boating scene set on the river Seine. Monet and Renoir painted similar modern subjects at the same spot.