Impressionist style. Watercolor portrait

Author: Guan Jianxin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-09-01
Features: A series of guidebooks for exam preparation. Since the 15th century, Western painters have made relentless efforts and explorations to "conquer reality," continuously refining the system of realistic painting and achieving remarkable accomplishments in the study of form and space. However, a painting movement known as "Impressionism" brought this system to completion in the realm of color exploration. In 1874, a group of young, innovative painters who were excluded from the official Salon established an association to exhibit their own works. At their exhibition, a critic, based on the title of Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise, gave these artists the nickname "Impressionists." This name has stuck, and the mocking connotation has long been forgotten, much like the pejorative meanings of names such as "Gothic," "Baroque," or "Mannerism" have been lost over time. After some time, the group themselves also adopted the name "Impressionism." Of course, what is even more important is that people gradually came to understand and recognize their contributions and significance to art.
Edouard Manet's exhibition of Luncheon on the Grass at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 freed painting from irrelevant rationalism and literary elements, viewing things entirely in terms of their artistic value, thus pointing a path for young painters determined to break away from the academic tradition. These painters collaborated, exhibited their works together, and maintained close contact. They included Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, and early Cézanne. Except for Degas, they mostly began their explorations by directly confronting landscapes. While they also produced many portraits, Renoir was the one among them who most directly and thoroughly studied the overall impression of figures in relation to light and color. For example, in his painting Nude Under the Sun from 1876, the rich colors, with free brushstrokes that blur the details of the figure, place the body in the shadows of the woods, enveloping the model in a kaleidoscope of sunlight and harmonizing it with the background in color.
Degas, in temperament, was a classical figure painter, but his treatment of subjects, especially his seemingly casual modern-life scenes like dance halls and nightclubs, with their strong contrasts of warm and cool colors and rich palettes, demonstrate his importance as one of the key Impressionist painters. Impressionist painting is a representation of visual reality, and this visual reality is not simply preserving the surface appearance of natural objects but rather the reflections of light and shadow, the interplay between objects and their environment, the ever-changing scenes captured by a moving eye—the world as we actually see it. The entire world provided suitable subjects for Impressionist and subsequent painters.
"Artists, when considering what to paint and how to paint it, follow only their own sensitivity and are not responsible for anything else." Despite the emergence of many new art movements in the short period following Impressionism, one thing remains: the sunlight of Impressionism dispelled the dull tones of earlier painting and was inherited by later generations. For example, Post-Impressionists like Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Rouault, as well as later artists like the Nabis.
The fundamental characteristic of Impressionist color theory is that the color of objects arises from the light they are illuminated by. Under different conditions of time, environment, climate, and other objective factors, objects under varying light and shadow exhibit different colors. Even shadows themselves have color, not just as slightly darker tones than the local colors of the objects. The shadows of trees, for instance, are often light blue, and the illuminated parts of the faces of figures seated near a window are often much cooler in tone than the shaded parts.
From a drawing perspective, Impressionists were not strict in adhering to precise outlines and detailed rendering. Due to their meticulous observation and depiction of color changes, their brushwork employed small, opaque strokes applied directly to the canvas for modeling. These strokes are often arranged side by side or layered, with vibrant colors and dynamic brushwork that almost eliminate clear contour lines. Of course, there were also techniques that utilized different materials, such as the effects created by variations in the thickness of color layers.
This book selects representative works of Impressionist painters, Post-Impressionist painters, and Nabi painters, focusing on their portraiture, to interpret and introduce to beginners in painting. Here, only general introductions are provided based on the author's understanding of each painter's artistic characteristics. However, each painter possesses their own unique personality and inner spirit, which cannot be imitated.