Impressionism: Capturing Life at the Holburne Museum, Bath

Making the most of some time in the holidays, I found myself in Bath with my other half and my in-laws. Whilst everyone took the chance to roam around Sydney Gardens I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to head inside of the Holburne Museum and take a look around the Impressionism: Capturing Life exhibition.

Thanks to having re-packed my wallet for a recent trip to Lyon, I was without my Art Fund card but thankfully the very kind lady on the desk accepted my assurances that I was, in fact, a paid up member and let me in for the pretty knock-out price of £4.00. Hard to say no for the price of a fancy cup of coffee!

The exhibition itself has been put together, along with a pretty excellent guide going by the same name by Museum Director Jennifer Scott. Scott has drawn together a work that covers the range and depth of impressionistic art with sophistication and subtlety, producing an accompanying book that not only builds upon and complements the exhibition but also stands well in its own regard.

The exhibition itself is built around 28 pieces that all tie to the first Impressionist exhibition in France in April of 1874. Of course, the artists whose work was shown were yet to exhibit under the name of Impressionism and this exhibition was put together by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. This initial showing featured many of the now essential figures of Impressionism; Monet, Degas, Pissarro who were making a concerted attempt to stand outside the precepts of the official Salon and the selective process of the jury of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. We know, too, that much of the work was met with derision, dismissal, and contempt – although not universally so, as is often suggested. At the Holburne, Scott has attempted to regain a flavour of that initial showing, taking 28 representative works from across that exhibition and presenting, in miniature, a first Impressionism exhibition. The exhibition guide gives a sense of just what an impressive little collection this is, with works coming from The Tate, The National Gallery, London and The Scottish National Gallery.”

Whilst nothing will capture the disruptive energy of that initial showing in 1874 what Scott has managed to do, that many other Impressionism exhibitions miss, is to give a real cross section of the kinds of work that were displayed in the first flush of Impressionism. Too often these exhibitions focus only on the headline figures of Monet, Degas, Pissarro et al. Yet Scott has woven together quite a diverse range of works, from the well-known to the hardly-known, whilst also avoiding the temptation to over-represent any particular figure – this, although wrought on a much smaller scale, gives far more of an air of the original showing than any selection of ‘famous’ images or works.

Of particular interest to me was the work of Sir George Clausen, a name I knew but only in passing and only, often, as an addendum to lists of much more famous names. The exhibition guide tells us that Clausen was an

“…often overlooked British Impressionist… [and]  founder-member of the New English Art Club.”

The Holburne holds a small collection of his works on paper which were featured in the exhibition along with some of his larger paint work and they made for a very interesting counter-point to the more commonly lauded works of the French Impressionists. Clausen’s painting shares all of the same ethereal light, focus on colour, and play with loose, expressive brushwork that the French impressionists do, his palette evokes both Degas and Renoir in many ways. He shares, too, an interest in the rural and the life of ‘peasant’ folk and it was not a great surprise for me to learn he had studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

Clausen’s Portrait of a Girl’s Head I found particularly arresting – the figure takes up an uncommonly large portion of the picture, giving us a rather intimate encounter with the sitter, the background – in places, expressively delineated leaves, collapses into brush strokes and blocks of colour and yet there is an intense delicacy in face, expression, vivid eyes that speak of life.

A few days later I was in the Tate Britain and encountered a second painting, one which I had seen before but, tucked onto a small dividing wall, I had really only skimmed in the past. Straight away I knew it must be a Clausen; the same eyes – vibrating with life – the swift delicacy of brush picking out the face, the expression, the sitter’s gaze that looks just beyond us, away – refusing to lock eyes. The same gesturally suggested backdrop, this time of fields and a few wild flowers. I find something particularly arresting about these portraits that I find missing in the portraiture of other Impressionists, there is a sense that these figures have been caught in a moment and know nothing of the fact that they’re being rendered in art. The innocence, in this sense, creates something far more ‘real’ than those moments in the salon of lounging women that we see in many other portraits of the time. This sense of truth coupled with the fresh, lively colour work puts me in mind of Singer-Sargent though I’ve yet to think of an artist who quite captures just how startling eyes can be as Clausen does.

I was also very pleased by the number and range of female artists included in the exhibition. This, too, speaks to the approach Scott has taken of giving us a broad selection of works that present, in miniature, that initial showing. Shying away from over representing the big names of impressionism opens up the chance for encounters with artists such as Clausen and the imaginative, expressive works of female Impressionists such as Berthe Morisot whose Girl on a Divan is a vibrant, sensational portrait revelling in colour and with a refusal to kowtow to traditional concepts of form or structure. I can only imagine that the Impressionists’ rejection of the Salon must have opened a space much more accepting of female artists but I’d admit this is only a hunch.

Whilst Clausen will certainly be the figure that stays with me from this exhibition – his pencil sketches alone are remarkable, I think Jennifer Scott’s most significant achievement in this curation is breaking open a movement that can often feel overly familiar and showing that within the well-trodden ground strewn with the works of Monet, Degas et al, lies much work worthy of real consideration and yet still fresh and unfamiliar to audiences. We should always try and resist summing a whole movement by those figures that end up on postcards or mugs and look to see what else exists there may be worth taking a look at.

In Jorge-Louis Borges story Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote  Borges asks the reader to try approaching appreciation and criticism in the arts in a unique way – he asks us, if we can, to imagine the dissolving of history, that chronology is fluid and malleable, and to see creative works in this way. He says, what would it mean for The Odyssey of Homer if it had been written before the Iliad, how would we see it differently? I think something similar is being done here. Let us forget the proceeding decades of history and art history in particular. Let us forget who the big names of Impressionism came to be. Let us see this exhibition as those seeing the very first, virginal, fresh, without an idea of who the great figures will be. To look on the collective works of Impressionism with that spirit, the spirit that erases the last 100 years of debate and discourse and tries, as hard as it will be, to appreciate these pieces as though still wet on the wall is quite a challenge but one, I think, that can offer real rewards. Perhaps we should try this elsewhere? Just imagine, how different would we see things if cubism had come before the Renaissance? Pop art before baroque?