1. Impression: A Romantic Anti-Concept for Naturalists and Impressionists

Shiff​, Richard

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1. Impression: A Romantic Anti-Concept for Naturalists and Impressionists

Richard Shiff

Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism

Beyond the purposes of illustration, illusion, and decoration, pictorial art assumes an aspirational purpose. Either it affirms a moral principle, consistent with an ideological program, or it provokes an uninhibited sensory and emotional response. In the latter case, art informs the self about itself, rather than about the social order and its stock identities (gendered, racial, ethnic, economic,...

Author

Richard Shiff

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20001

Chapter subject tags:Impressionism (Art)Photography--History--19th centuryThoré, T. (Théophile), 1807-1869Art criticism--France--History--19th centuryPsychology and art--France--19th centuryPainting--Technique--France--History--19th centuryCorot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 1796-1875Landscape painting, French--19th centuryArt, French--19th century--Exhibitions

1. Impression: A Romantic Anti-Concept for Naturalists and Impressionists

Richard Shiff

Beyond the purposes of illustration, illusion, and decoration, pictorial art assumes an aspirational purpose. Either it affirms a moral principle, consistent with an ideological program, or it provokes an uninhibited sensory and emotional response. In the latter case, art informs the self about itself, rather than about the social order and its stock identities (gendered, racial, ethnic, economic, institutional, and so on). Conventional interpretations of imagery render it doctrinaire. Yet, if the visual form jolts sensory experience sufficiently, it unhinges the emotions from the intellect, purging the image of its ideological constructs. To the extent that the two functions of pictorial art (discursive and affective) counter rather than complement each other, each will struggle to occupy the soul of the prevailing visual culture.

The French republican Théophile Thoré, featured in this essay, linked the pronounced individuality of English painters to the British tradition of self-governance: “This is what the French artists lack, as they nearly always follow some external authority, traditions, and prejudices.”1 Thoré-Bürger [Théophile Thoré], “Salon de 1863,” in Les Salons (Brussels: Lamertin, 1893), 3:421. On Thoré’s politics, see Frances S. Jowell, “Politique et esthétique: Du citoyen Thoré à William Bürger,” in La critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon (Saint-Etienne: CIEREC, 1989), 25–41; Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 181–87. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. In quoting from nineteenth-century sources, I have retained instances where the gendering of a collective noun is exclusively masculine. Thoré’s anglophilia accorded with an anti-ideological lineage of French commentary that valued sensation over concept, feeling over message. His sympathies were those of a Romantic of the 1830s and 1840s. He took a stance, a colleague wrote, “where feeling [le sentiment] dominates scientific method without eliminating it.”2 [Arsène Houssaye?], L’artiste 4, 10/2 (July 1847): 30. “Feeling,” at once sensory and emotional, characterized an emergent art of the impression—attentive to the material world, as unmediated as possible by theoretical concepts, codified conventions, and institutionalized practices. Despite its materialism, verging on empiricism, such an art reflected what Thoré and others called “poetry [poésie] . . . the capacity to feel [sentir] life inwardly in its essence.” Whatever art resulted from poetic feeling would consequently “express life outwardly in its form.” Invention accomplishes the necessary mediation: “[Artists] invent . . . the form of poetic feeling that nature or life inspires in them.”3 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” in Les Salons, 1:445. See also Thoré’s claim that “poetry is not nature but the feeling that nature inspires in the artist”: “Salon de 1844,” in Les Salons, 1:20. The question becomes: What inventive technique suits the expression of an impression? To regard the so-called “impression” and its associated “poetry” in this manner was to narrow the connotation of colloquial terms already bearing virtually all the idiomatic usages familiar today (in both French and English). A survey of nineteenth-century art criticism generates a mélange of the colloquial and the technical, an indication of how thoroughly concepts of the “impression,” of “sensation,” and of the “poetic” had permeated everyday discourse at the time.4 For example, justifying the use of novel terminology, a critic writes of seeking the best “expression to translate the impression received”: Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1834,” in Études sur l’école française (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855), 1:243.

The year in which Thoré compared the institutionalized French school of painting unfavorably with British self-governance was 1863. He was reviewing the “Refusés” or “Réprouvés” section of the state-sponsored Salon exhibition, which included Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (then titled Le bain). Although appreciative of Manet’s talents, Thoré found this work thematically “absurd.”5 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:425. But the critic’s sharpest attention turned elsewhere. He wondered whether the artists rejected by the Salon jury shared an attitude that had led to their predicament. Indeed, they did; they were, according to Thoré, artists who “seize art at its origin,” bypassing generations of evolved practice. Thoré concluded that the rejected artists “aspire to render the effect [l’effet] in its striking unity, without correcting contours or accessory details.” This explained an aspect of Manet’s work and was even more relevant to the work of those pursuing pure landscape, as nature in the raw lacked precise resolution. “With its gradations of light into shadow, the finish [le fini] disappears, and the artist has only to render the general aspect.”6 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:413–15, italics omitted. Three years later, a more conservative writer, the academic theorist Charles Blanc, noted the same trend toward reduced detail, though with serious misgiving: “Our painters busy themselves above all with rendering the impression . . . hardly covering the canvas.”7 Charles Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” Gazette des beaux-arts 21 (July 1866): 37, 40.

DEFINITIONS

Quite literally, an impression is an impress, a point of contact between two surfaces, with the implication of leaving a trace.8 This sense of the impression corresponds to the first and presumably most fundamental of many definitions for “impression” in Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris: Hachette, 1866), 3:38: “Action de presser sur.” To impress is to act upon, as in the derivative, abstract sense of impressing a person with one’s importance. During the nineteenth century, psychology—the study of sensation, emotion, and cognition—developed as a natural science, departing from its history as a branch of philosophical metaphysics. One of the more psychologically oriented yet standard definitions of the French term "impression" followed the eighteenth-century empiricism of David Hume: “the effect produced on the bodily organs by the action of external objects” or “the more or less pronounced effect that external objects make upon the sense organs.”9 Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1873), 9:604; Littré, Dictionnaire, 3:38. For Hume’s definition, see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge (1740; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1: “Those perceptions, which enter [the mind] with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul.” Such an “impression” connotes primacy as well as contact, as reflected colloquially in a person’s desire to leave a positive first impression. By extension, impression as an effect on the sense organs becomes an “effect that some cause produces in the heart or mind” (tantamount to Thoré’s poetic feeling).10 Littré, Dictionnaire, 3:38. With connotative fluidity, impression as sensory feeling (French: sensation) converges upon impression as emotion (sentiment, émotion) as well as impression as thought or mental image (idée).

The reference to “heart or mind” appears in the dictionary that Émile Littré compiled and corresponds to his understanding of psychology. In 1860 he argued that an external object cannot be known directly but only through an individual’s impression of it. In other words, we induce a view of the external world from impressions that are necessarily relative to where we are, when we are living, and who we are (our disposition, our accumulated, conditioned attitude).11 Émile Littré, “De quelques points de physiologie psychique” (1860), in La science au point de vue philosophique (Paris: Didier, 1873), 312, 314. Experience is all, whether seeming to originate internally or externally.

Littré regarded the primacy of the impression as fundamental to any subsequent philosophical distinction. “There is something primordial, but it is neither the subject nor the object, neither the self nor the [external] non-self; it is the impression perceived. A perceived impression does not in any sense constitute the idea of the subject or of the object, it is only the element of these ideas.”12 Littré, “De quelques points,” 315. If an impression repeats, the sense of it develops, as if the germ of a sense were growing; we generalize the sensory information as an “effect . . . in the heart or mind” (returning to one of Littré’s definitions). The impression is the embryo of both bodies of human knowledge, a person’s subjective knowledge of self (heart) and objective or projective knowledge of an external world (mind). An art of the impression would establish a subjective feeling, necessarily personal, as well as an objective meaning, potentially public. Or, to put it more clearly, it would represent neither—it would eliminate this deceptive dichotomy. If so, the feeling might evoke a concrete meaning, or we might need to acknowledge that any assumed meaning reduces to an incommunicable feeling. Each possibility is destabilized in view of its other.

Littré’s position on the significance of the impression was hardly unusual. Both Théodule Ribot and Hippolyte Taine, involved in disseminating anglophone psychology in France, discussed the impression as the most “primitive” of phenomena, a “primitive fact or event [fait primitif]” that depended on conditions both internal and external, subjective and objective.13 Théodule Ribot, La psychologie anglaise contemporaine (Paris: Ladrange, 1870), 59; Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence (1870; repr., Paris: Hachette, 1888), 1:166–69. Littré, Ribot, and Taine tended to equate the impression with sensation. Others distinguished sensations as impressions actively felt rather than subliminal.14 Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel, 9:604–5; Georges Guéroult, “Du rôle du movement des yeux dans les émotions esthétiques,” Gazette des beaux-arts 23 (June 1881): 537. Littré himself, as if aware of this wrinkle, wrote of the “perceived” impression, one sensed or noticed (with a hint of distinguishing conscious from unconscious sentience). In the early critical commentary on French impressionism, the phrases “l’impression perçue” (potentially, an internal phenomenon) and “l’impression reçue” (the external become internal) appear frequently.

In 1874 Jules-Antoine Castagnary famously defined the French impressionists as painters who, “once the impression has been seized and fixed, declare their role terminated. . . . They render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.”15 Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “L’exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les impressionnistes,” Le siècle, April 29, 1874, 3. The stimulus to art passes from a physiological impression, to a felt sensation, to the technique of painting as a fitting response to both vision and feeling. It may have been problematic to restrict an exhibited work to the appearance of its impression, sensation, or effect (recall Blanc’s objection in 1866: “hardly covering the canvas”).16 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 40. Yet the absence of those qualities associated with lived physiological and psychological conditions could also be problematic, providing cause to dismiss a work as devoid of human feeling. Art critics throughout the nineteenth century commonly, and rather casually, used terms such as “impression,” “effet,” and “idée” to distinguish the expected aspects of a painting worth interpreting. Reviewing the Salon of 1873, a year before he visited the First Impressionist Exhibition, Castagnary took aim at a narrative composition by the young military painter Étienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour. He described its organization as stiffly artificial, resulting in “neither impression nor effect”—the work lacked a general integrating quality as well as any specific, discernible characterization. And the guiding “concept [l’idée]” did not fare much better; rigidly presented, it was reduced to “utter puerility.”17 Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Salon de 1873,” in Salons (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 2:86.

NEXT TO NOTHING

If the impression is the primordial event of consciousness and not one of several types of originary impulse, can it then be subject to repetition, as Littré and others seem to have assumed? And, by this means, can it inspire an associated concept? After having reviewed Camille Corot somewhat ambivalently on earlier occasions, in 1867 Thoré faulted him for painting virtually the same impression in each of his works—though the failure did entail some merit: “[Corot] seems to stop fatally in the limbo of incomplete execution, [with] a certain charm that results from his rather mysterious impression. . . . He has almost always made and remade the same painting, even when he has rendered very different sites.”18 Thoré-Bürger, “Exposition universelle de 1867,” in Les Salons, 3:357–58. “Corot has hardly ever made but one and the same landscape, but it is good”: Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1865,” in Les Salons, 3:223. Thoré’s observation implies either a lack of imagination on Corot’s part or the artist’s faith in his naïve being, a degree of sincerity that would homogenize all external difference in conformity to personal vision (his “certain charm”).

Because Corot’s art was so “poetic,” Thoré could welcome its repetition. “The issue is to evoke in the viewer of these subtle images the feeling [sentiment] he would have of the countryside on a gentle early morning beside a lake.”19 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1865,” 3:224. Logic dictates that an impression, recognized as such, ought to have some feature that repeats, as if to become its defining characteristic, independent of the artist perceiving it. Yet the notion of coding elemental experience is itself illogical. If a phenomenon must repeat to be recognized for what it is, no phenomenon can be originary. The putative unique impression would be like a word with no iteration—a phenomenon devoid of attaining any meaningful classification. The impression would have no means of entering any psychological or sensory discourse, including art criticism. As a result—logic be damned—a painter aiming to depict an impression would need to provide it with some technical, material particularity available both to the senses and to the intellect. The impression known to theory might be chimerical, but the one appearing in art would have to establish a material reality. We expect of this primordial psychological event that it translates into pictorial discourse, becoming, at the least, an ideal for the Romantic end of critical practice. Thoré assumed as much in 1864: “Corot is incomparable in sustaining poetic images with next to nothing. It is hardly painted, but the impression is there, communicated from the artist to the viewer.”20 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1864,” in Les Salons, 3:76.

“Next to nothing”: frequent mention of this technical peculiarity (approved by Thoré, challenged by Blanc) indicates that a reduction in the relative quantity of paint marks signified both the experience of the impression and the poetic effect it generated. In 1853 Charles Clément commented, “Corot renders his impression simply and naïvely. . . . He reduces technique to its most elementary form and puts on the canvas only enough painting to say what he feels, as if he feared obscuring his thought with the veil of an abundance of execution.”21 Charles Clément, “Les paysagistes français contemporains” (1853), in Études sur les beaux-arts en France (Paris: Michel Lévey frères, 1869), 336. When Blanc raised his objection to the principle of “only enough,” he had a different criterion in mind, though one just as phenomenological in orientation: “The artist who paints with broad strokes within a small format contradicts himself dramatically because, even as the small scale of the frame invites me to come near, the largeness of the execution holds me at a distance.”22 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 38. Landscape art was typically easel painting of modest scale; a loose rendering, played for effect, resulted in an inconsistent loss of resolution.

Despite Blanc’s theoretical principles, he gave Corot a pass, if somewhat reluctantly, as his effect was more of a memory impression, selective in its recollected details. On the contrary, the slew of Corot’s “imitators . . . leave the appearance of having finished when they have only made a beginning.”23 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 40. Blanc noted that Corot’s two contributions to the Salon of 1866, Le soir and Solitude: Recollection of Vigen, Limousin (fig. 1), were not faithful to any specific site; rather, they were “vague recollections.” “He communicates only his impression . . . without our regretting leaves missing from the trees [or] fissures absent from the rocks. . . . Corot enjoys all the liberties we accord to poets.”24 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 38. The loose web of marks in Corot’s easel paintings—the scatter of foliage that defines the central tree in Solitude—could be excused as the indication of a composition coming into being through memory and imagination. Literal completeness need not factor into poetic recollection, which is characterized by evocation rather than description.

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Description: Solitude: Recollection of Vigen, Limousin by Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille

Fig. 1. Camille Corot, Solitude: Recollection of Vigen, Limousin, 1866. Oil on canvas, 95 × 130 cm (37 3/8 × 51 3/16 in.). Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Inv. no. (CTB.1999.27).

Could an art that shifted the balance of sensation and poetry toward sensory observation also dispense with a pretense to completeness? There are indications that the question was problematic for some and richly suggestive for others. Reviewing the “Refusés” in 1863, Ernest Chesneau wondered (as Thoré did) what in the rejected landscapes could have caused the academic jury to disapprove. In the work of Henri-Joseph Harpignies he noted the same failing Blanc would articulate in 1866: “He limits himself to indicating impressions received before nature. The impression is entirely correct, fair enough, but it is only the indication of a painting to be made [à faire] and not one done [fait].” Chesneau raised the ironical possibility that—if such “excessive simplifications” were left unchecked—soon someone would present a landscape having only two colors, “a green, next to a gray or blue for the sky; and this quite right as tone [valeur] and effect [effet].”25 Ernest Chesneau, “L’école française” (1863), in L’art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1864), 195. If reduction were to become an established principle, it could just as easily become a preconceived strategy, an affectation rather than a response to sensory experience. Clément, in his review of Corot, required a parenthetical caveat for second-guessing: “He has proven that one can be a painter of style without using the academic apparatus. Monotonous, clumsy (is it by nature or by intention?).”26 Clément, “Les paysagistes français contemporains,” 335. Monotony or uniformity, as well as an inarticulate clumsiness or awkwardness, had become acknowledged signs of direct observation, with each moment of record equivalent in sensation, rather than structured toward a hierarchy of cultural relevance.27 Another example of this observation: Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1857,” Revue des deux mondes 10 (July 1857): 398–99.

Chesneau, Clément, and others imagined a radical loss of differentiation inconsistent with the traditional craft of painting, yet—if we follow Littré—consistent with the theory of primordial sensation. If, at the origin before the origin there is nothing, then “next to nothing” would signify the “something” that constitutes an original impression. Less was the goal, but the reduction would be limited by the desire for an interpretable image, a degree of repeatable representation. Not only were visual distinctions problematically removed by the new trend in landscape art but also its element of tactile description, its potential to communicate the sense of touch and texture. In his Grammaire des arts du dessin of 1867, which became a standard resource for art academies, Blanc argued the case for descriptively articulated brushwork. “Touch should be varied . . . according to the character of the [represented] objects.” He also considered perspective: “When it becomes progressively indefinite, touch . . . indicates the presence of air.”28 Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867; repr., Paris: Henri Laurens, 1880), 577–78. For an early version of Blanc’s argument, see Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1831,” in Études sur l’école française, 1:38 (critical of Henri Decaisne). Here Blanc referred to the atmospheric distance so often lacking in naïve painting, with its uniform facture. A possibility emerges: a technique of undifferentiated, nondescriptive touches of paint might signify the primordial tactile, analogous to the primordial optical. Blanc advocated a pragmatic touch applied to a descriptive end; an exploratory touch might also operate, seeking unknown form rather than tracing the known.

AN ALTERNATIVE PRIMORDIAL

Each sense organ receives its appropriate impress. Just as the eye responds to rays of light of varying wavelengths and intensities, so the sense of touch responds to palpation of different degrees and kinds of pressure. Psychologists regard touch as primary to vision within the course of human development. Taking linguistic signs as evidence, we might expect this, for “impress,” with its allusion to material contact, is, as we know, the primary sense of “impression.”

Consider the nineteenth-century accounts of sensation that feature touch. In 1899 the prominent German theorist Karl Groos invoked the work of his French predecessor, Bernard Perez: “Sensitivity to conditions of touch is already present in the newborn infant. . . . ‘At three months, the infant begins to reach out to grasp with the hand; it feels [things] like a novice connoisseur.’”29 Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1899), 8–9; Groos is quoting Bernard Perez, Les trois premières années de l’enfant (1878; repr., Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892), 45. The first sensation, as well as the first sensory “art,” is that of touch. Preceding the line quoted by Groos, Perez offered a statement on vision and hearing, which, somewhat less immediately, develop similarly, from an inarticulate response mechanism to a refined faculty: “These two senses, which become two outstanding instruments of instruction and emotivity”—serving the two extremes of aesthetic purpose, ideological and sensual—“function above all for themselves, if I dare say it, and with an aim wholly affective, as if disinterested. The infant at two months, at three months, passes the great majority of its waking hours in looking in order to see [à regarder pour voir] and in listening in order to hear, solely for the pleasure received, without any immediate or subsequent utility.”30 Perez, Trois premières années de l’enfant, 45. Perez has described unmotivated vision—a primitive, unknowing version of a French Romantic’s “art for art’s sake,” art released from its ideological obligations to history, religion, and politics. The infant’s acts of looking have no ulterior purpose other than to provide the experiential pleasure of looking itself, resulting in an increase or enhancement of seeing. “Looking in order to see,” he wrote.

Perez continued, invoking the “impression” as an unmotivated sensation that arrives without being sought: “The infant, whom certain authors consider exclusively as a little utilitarian creature, works above all for the pleasure of experiencing sensations, of perceiving new impressions. . . . This inclination continues at all ages of life. When the adult is not compelled by [social demands] to discipline all the faculties under the control of practical attention, he returns to the infant in whom the instinct for the sensory and unconscious dominates the instinct for the intellectual and purposeful. Entirely at ease, he resumes looking in order to see, listening to hear, touching to feel, and exercising himself to move, solely for the sake of pleasurable or even indifferent sensations that these automatic actions provide.”31 Perez, Trois premières années de l’enfant, 45–46.

We might regard Perez’s phrasing, “new impressions,” as pleonastic, reasoning that all impressions arise as unique sensory events. If it seems that one impression repeats another, we may be encountering an impression-imprint as opposed to an impression-sensation—a material repetition, like a lithographic or photographic print, as opposed to an existential or experiential repetition, which would exemplify the uncanny. The repetitiveness that Thoré perceived in Corot is a strange hybrid of the existential and the material (or even the mechanical, if the hand operates in a programmed way). But the type of impression that concerned a so-called “naturalist” or “impressionist” painter, as well as most photographers, was best regarded as an existential event. Its cultural significance would lie in its exceptional individuality and immediacy.

VISUAL IMPRESSIONS, MATERIAL POETRY

The material mark and its existential occurrence have long been central to conceptions of modern art. In a review of the Salon of 1847, Paul Mantz, an admirer of Thoré, argued that landscape painters who attempt no more than registering the image before them inevitably introduce traces of individuality to their work. “In landscape naïvely studied, without the preoccupation of style, a highly poetic element, which traditional [academicized] landscape will not admit, can slip in—this is the personality of the artist.”32 Paul Mantz, Salon de 1847 (Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1847), 96. Mantz approved of Thoré’s politics in principle, but found their application impractical; see Paul Mantz, “Salons de T. Thoré,” Gazette des beaux-arts 24 (April 1868): 403. The natural poetry of personal experience distances an artist from the formulaic “lessons of the masters . . . the tradition” and all their ideological implications. When Mantz referred to the trace of an individual as something that would “slip into [il peut se glisser]” the picture, as if to “slide by” and thereby escape conscious attention, he was appreciating the relatively untrained artist’s lack of self-conscious affectation. The less professional the painter, the more likely the capacity for “looking in order to see.” And the obvious sign of such personalized visual experience would be a peculiarity in paint handling, as if the hand were following the immediacy of the eye and not the conventions for a skillful, decorous touch: in Corot, according to Clément, fidelity to sensation led to “clumsiness”—a common conclusion among critics.33 Clément, “Paysagistes français contemporains,” 335.

Mantz’s position entails that the more intensely and scrupulously a painter observes a given site, the more subjective and the less normative the picture—perhaps even the site itself—becomes, defying what everyone, the painter included, might have expected from an effort at objectivity. Mantz imagined that a landscapist, passing through the countryside and disposed in a certain mood, leaves a mark on nature simply by being there: “Exhilarated or depressed, . . . it seems that something of oneself is left suspended in the hushed thickets and . . . mute trees.”34 Mantz, Salon de 1847, 95–96. To render nature as it exists is tantamount to representing intimate feelings without intending it, nature having assimilated the emotion spontaneously. Thoré’s two sources of aesthetic value, external nature and inner life, combine in the naïve landscapist’s impression. The direction of the projection—artist to nature, or nature to artist—remains indeterminate.

The social order, with its institutions of art, interferes with such naturalistic intimacy. Regarding the same Salon of 1847, Thoré noted instances of resistance to norms for technical procedure—inadvertently violated by Mantz’s naïve landscapists—as well as resistance to the canon of proper subject matter. The poetry of a painting should rise above any doctrine associated with its thematics: “The subject represented does not matter at all in the arts. . . . The value of each work lies in the profound, unimpeachable, and, as it were, specific character that the artist has been able to impress on his creation.”35 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:447. Also in 1847, Thoré commented on seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, work by the likes of Adriaen van Ostade, as if it prefigured what he appreciated in his contemporaries. “The subject means nothing, and we are deeply embarrassed in describing such naïve compositions, which have no distinct character other than their quality of execution.” The embarrassment derived from the critic’s failure to illuminate a domestic scene, when its depicted features led his imagination nowhere. This loss nevertheless yielded a benefit. “These paintings prove that much more the value of art itself, because here serious thinking, with its profound conceptualization, amounts to absolutely nothing. . . . Study these naïve masters, who might pass for naturalists making daguerreotype reproductions, and you will understand that there is nevertheless invention and genius in their impression of nature.”36 Théophile Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” L’artiste 4, 10/4 (July 1847): 52, italics mine. Thoré was attracted to this art because he regarded Dutch culture as fundamentally democratic. By Thoré’s reckoning, the ineffable visual poetry of art, linked to an “impression of nature,” attains higher cultural value than any interpretation of the configured scene and its characters.

Emphasizing direct observation and the development of material effects—materiality coupled with indifference to the discursive subject—Thoré recommended that an artist limit initial action to a certain recognition. “Nature assumes the role of composing images, fully ready to be reproduced in a form of art. A landscapist stops along a forest path and finds a complete picture on the spot, with a central effect and well-organized lines. He has only to paint what has been made directly by nature.”37 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:538, italics omitted. Thoré was asserting that painters could prosper in the absence of authoritative antecedents, without the traditions associated with an aristocratic social order and its academic teachings, preconditions to representational expression. Facing nature, painters would discover a “complete picture” that would prove superior to work of academic convention, the latter of which necessarily operates in concert with the grand ideological abstractions of Church, Empire, and Capital. Given an ease with the technical medium, personal expression would follow, as if automatic, from an otherwise unstructured adherence to the visible scene. The artist need only establish an emotional rapport with nature, itself a “natural” condition (virtually the same point Mantz argued).38 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:477–79. “I have always maintained,” Thoré stated near the end of his career, “that true painters paint very quickly, and from the impression [d’impression].”39 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1868,” in Les Salons, 3:514. Here, “d’impression” suggests not only the immediate sensation but the first layer of a constructed painting, the element most quickly established. Technically, “peinture d’impression” is paint applied in broad, flat strokes, as in painting a wall. On “peinture d’impression,” see Anthea Callen, The Work of Art: Plein-Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion, 2015), 193. On the factor of quickness, see Richard R. Brettell, Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1890 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

The value judgments of Thoré’s artist, like those of a politically autonomous individual—the paradigmatic, self-governing Englishman or Dutch citizen—would be guided by local experience.40 On the critic’s attribution of social content, see Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1845,” in Les Salons, 1:105. The strict reproduction of a view, appearing nevertheless as visual poetry, might reorient an intellect programmed to follow ideologically sanctioned channels. With expected messages nowhere to be found, viewers could indulge in “looking in order to see.” Early works by the painters who became known as “impressionists” in 1874, the year of their first independent exhibition, often depicted the unassuming lanes and pathways in the suburbs and villages where they lived. Camille Pissarro’s Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn) (1870) represents such a view of undistinguished land that is yet painted at a scale large enough to suit Salon exhibition (fig. 2).41 Most likely, this work was exhibited in the Salon of 1870 or had at least been submitted to the jury; see Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 2005), 2:140–41 (where the title is Maisons à Bougival). Théodore Duret, future advocate of impressionist art, commented, “He never composes a picture, and, in a landscape, never arranges nature. . . . Often he happens to paint insignificant sites, where nature herself creates so little of a composition that he paints a landscape without making [an organized] picture.”42 Théodore Duret, “Salon de 1870,” in Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), 8–9. In 1867 Duret had expressed ambivalence about Corot, separating what for Thoré could be affiliated features, arguing that some of his landscape views were straightforward impressions, whereas others had been altered by his poetic predispositions: Théodore Duret, Les peintres français en 1867 (Paris: Dentu, 1867), 26–28. For Duret, the proof of the artist’s direct, emotionally engaged observation is a composition that lacks “composition.” To follow the critic’s hints is to perceive that the casualness of the distribution of trees and houses across Pissarro’s picture—his neglect of hierarchical order, his failure to set planes into spatial recession—contributes to a lack of composition of any conventional sort. The individual marks of his brush, aggressively tactile in their effect, offer a sense of viscous paint rather than the look of a variety of substances. Pissarro’s foliage is clotted pigment, like the clods of his earth. A scene so inconsequential, yet so forceful in material execution, held little ideological potential except in resistance to institutionalized ideology. It shifted an investment in conceptualization to an interest in materialization.

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Description: Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn) by Pissarro, Camille

Fig. 2. Camille Pissarro, Landscape at Louveciennes (Autumn), 1870. Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 116.2 cm (35 × 45 3/4 in.). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 82.PA.73.

In addition to the institutional and the anti-institutional currents of the Salon of 1863, the circumstances of the exhibition, which included the Salon des Refusés, provoked Thoré to distinguish art from non-art. True art was emotionally poetic and materially expressive; non-art amounted to a mechanism. In 1847, in a passage already quoted, Thoré had referred to Dutch masters of domesticity and still-life as those who, to inattentive observers, “might pass for naturalists making daguerreotype reproductions.”43 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. In 1863, fully attentive, he encountered painted “daguerreotypes” in the art of Blaise-Alexandre Desgoffe (fig. 3). Despite the marvel of its realistic illusion, Thoré argued that this work suffered from suppressing all indication of human involvement in the process. No sensation, no emotion: “Every human impression vanishes; the objects are not painted as each person sees them according to his temperament, but as they are in reality, an abstraction of the human mind and eye.” Reality as a confected abstraction would be the official version, the ideological reality, removed from an individual’s life as sensed and felt. Such reality represented objectivity without subjectivity, an organic impossibility. “Is it a work of art?” Thoré asked rhetorically. “Heavens no.” He proceeded to compare the “industrial” character of Desgoffe’s art to sculpture fashioned from a plaster cast and photographic images projected onto a glass plate. By analogy, Desgoffe himself became “only an inert agent, a mechanical intermediary.” Thoré’s commentary included a striking metaphor: Desgoffe seemed able to “grasp the actual object with the tip of his brush, setting it onto the canvas, without having done anything but transpose it.”44 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:409–10, italics omitted. For a defense of Desgoffe, see Chesneau, “L’école française,” 263–66. The artist had eliminated human touch, with the result that the viewer “thinks neither of the painter nor of the art”—two factors linked to touch as well as to vision.45 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:423.

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Description: Still Life with Fruit, Glass of Wine by Desgoffe, Blaise Alexandre

Fig. 3. Blaise-Alexandre Desgoffe, Still Life with Fruit, Glass of Wine, 1863. Oil on panel, 54 × 61 cm (21 1/4 × 24 in.). Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, 1996.3.

SINGULAR TOUCH

Irregularity or singularity in facture—Corot’s clumsiness, Pissarro’s exaggerated materiality—diverged from the academic standard, which was designed for ease of reproduction like a photographic template. Any resistant irregularity exercised a dual indexical function. It signaled the poetic presence of an individual artist (subjective) while becoming the record of a unique sensation, an existential moment in the artist’s life (objective). Nothing of singular interest appeared in Desgoffe’s art because his images of objects represented those same objects as commonly understood. Material objects were constants, whereas qualities of “the painter” and of “the art,” as Thoré implied, were evolving—including the materiality of art itself, an aspect of phenomenological process. The judgment that a work had been completed was becoming ever more arbitrary.

When Thoré associated Desgoffe’s imagery with “reality,” such a normalized realism differed from the lived reality of impressionists such as Pissarro and those of the following generation inspired by impressionism, notably Vincent van Gogh. “He is a realist,” Albert Aurier wrote of Van Gogh in 1890. “Through the occasional disorienting strangeness of his works . . . the naïve truth of his art is undeniable.” Van Gogh’s physicality was “excessive,” Aurier observed, causing “his own realism [to be] so different from [that] of his Dutch ancestors.”46 Albert Aurier, “Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh,” Mercure de France 1 (January 1890): 26–27. I turn to Van Gogh, an extreme case, as an efficient way of demonstrating the importance of the material, tactile factor (Aurier’s “excess”) in the late nineteenth-century development of representational imagery. Although the depicted subject was always central to his practice, Van Gogh inadvertently extended Thoré’s claim regarding those same “Dutch ancestors” whom Aurier invoked in contrast: “The subject means nothing.”47 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. As the most meaningful cultural sign, the physicality of paint-matter was displacing the ideality of realistic depiction, including the newly canonized subjects from modern life, represented by impressionists and academics alike. The significance of Van Gogh was the same, whether he copied a religious theme from a print after Eugène Delacroix in his studio or painted the night café in Arles at the scene.

An example: Van Gogh’s Landscape with Figures (1889; fig. 4). Here the direction and flow of the network of thickened marks in the sky respond not only to the configured foliage but to the rectilinear framing edges of the support, as if there were little pretense that the scene continues beyond these physical limits. The material marks respect the given dimensions. At the upper-left corner, a wavelike pattern becomes less wavelike and more of a repetitious set of parallel strokes aligned with the barrier of the left side of the canvas. This change in the character of the marks has no external referent, nor is it intended to represent variation in the sky or—at a remove from naturalistic representation—to function as decorative flourish in a pattern. Rather than establishing naturalistic illusion or decorative motif, Van Gogh’s marks indicate a bodily response to reaching a physical limit. His brushwork recognizes the picture itself (paint and canvas) as the “authority” to which a painter responds in an act of self-regulation. In Thoré’s terms of 1847, this was to demonstrate “the value of art itself”—an authorization outside institutions and beyond ideologies.48 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52.

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Description: Landscape with Figures by Gogh, Vincent van

Fig. 4. Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Figures, 1889. Oil on canvas, 49.9 × 65.4 cm (19 5/8 × 25 3/4 in.). Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, 1950, BMA 1950.303.

A final example: the case of Paul Cézanne and photography. When Cézanne took a graphic print as his model (he once copied the same work by Van Ostade that Thoré had admired), he responded to the preexisting image as he would to a scene selected from nature. He would imitate the look of the alien image as if it were the sole occupant of his attention, doing so with marks that were relatively alike as well as exaggerated in physicality, as if each recorded an equivalently emphatic moment of sensation (not unlike Corot’s “monotony,” but with far less discreet an affect). Cézanne’s use of photographic imagery as a source usually concerned portraiture; around 1879–80, he nevertheless resorted to working from landscape photography, presumably an image of Fontainebleau forest, and possibly the work of Eugène Cuvelier (fig. 5). This resulted in Melting Snow at Fontainebleau (fig. 6). Having visited the artist’s studio in 1904, Émile Bernard reported, “To my great astonishment, Cézanne had no objection to a painter’s use of photography; but in his case, it was necessary to interpret this exact reproduction just as he would interpret nature itself.”49 Émile Bernard, “Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne et lettres inédits,” Mercure de France 69 (October 1907): 609.The Desgoffe process in reverse.

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Fig. 5. Anonymous photograph, possibly by Eugène Cuvelier, c. 1860–75. Found by John Rewald among Cézanne’s papers. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art Photo Archives.

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Description: Melting Snow at Fontainebleau by Cézanne, Paul

Fig. 6. Paul Cézanne, Melting Snow at Fontainebleau, 1879–80. Oil on canvas, 73.7 × 100.7 cm (29 × 39 5/8 in.). Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As with Van Gogh’s, Cézanne’s marks in his landscape image display an independent organicism, apart from the depicted trees and rocks of the photograph. Ironically, the photographer met the painter halfway; typical calotypes of Fontainebleau capitalized on the soft-focus effects of a paper-print process, allowing this take on nature to become more competitive with paintings of similar views: a subtle sense of photographic blur would animate the pictorial surface, bringing its optical effect closer to a typical painting of the impression, one displaying a relatively coarse pattern of discrete strokes with fuzzy edges, and therefore resulting in a certain unarticulated uniformity (recall Corot in 1866). In Cézanne’s photographic source, both foreground vegetation and background foliage appear off-register with respect to the camera mechanism, the sharpest focus being reserved for the trees of the middle ground. This variation in resolution generated aesthetic interest for nineteenth-century viewers rather than judgments of technical deficiency. Paper-print photography nudged the medium known for mechanistic precision in the direction of a medium (painting) less precise but more expressive, personal, and “poetic.”50 Francis Wey argued that the soft-focus calotype print, as opposed to the crisp daguerreotype plate, “animated” the camera image, affording “the expression of feeling”: Francis Wey, “De l’influence de l’héliographie sur les beaux-arts,” La lumière, February 9, 1851, 2.

To stress the point: paper-print, negative-process photography (the calotype) lessened the focus present in the rival positive process, the daguerreotype (which had been invoked by Thoré with respect to Desgoffe). The calotype’s technical displacement increased what nineteenth-century viewers regarded as both the expressive and the “impressionist” character of the image. Whether they thought of it this way or not, mid-century photographers were gesturing in the direction of Corot (who was himself involved with photographic methods), as well as Pissarro, Cézanne, and other nascent French impressionists. The same cultural imperative encouraged painters themselves to “blur” their brushwork, stressing its animate quality by allowing its movement (the hand at work) to remain apparent. The two groups, photographers and painters, recognized a common physicality to which they were destined to respond. Taine, who theorized aesthetics for Cézanne’s contemporaries at the official École des beaux-arts, equated the sensory observation of external objects to “transient moments of our being.”51 Taine, De l’intelligence, 2:189. He stressed the instability of any experience of reality, which, although leaving its imprint in the human mind, also remained subject to change. Sensation was at once immediate, lasting, and variable (as is “our being”). For the following generation, Henri Bergson’s notion of “duration [la durée]” established much the same principle.52 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1889; repr., New York: Harper, 1960), 110. An artist’s need to provide a permanent picture of transiency corresponds to Cézanne’s understanding of sensation—“sensation above all,” he said—that linked external observation to internal feeling with a gesture of the brush.53 Cézanne’s words, recorded in the entry for January 26, 1906, in Maurice Denis, Journal (Paris: La Colombe, 1957–59), 2:29.

How to generate sensation in a painting? To introduce simultaneously the experience of the sensory impression and its emotional effect was the challenge. A further complication: the demand would have to be met without losing the active presence of the living artist, that is, without reducing the process to a mechanism. Cézanne’s reinvention of a photographic play of black-and-white as color exposes his method to plain sight. At the left side of the Fontainebleau photograph (see fig. 5), between two large trees in the middle distance, an area in the far distance consists of dense undergrowth that the camera captures in detail as nuanced grays. Cézanne’s expressively coarse, reductive touch would fail to accommodate this degree of resolution, however blurred. In response, he converted the undergrowth to a rise in the ground plane; this invented aspect of the “representation” could be conveyed broadly, as was his custom (see fig. 6). He rendered this area as fully chromatic as any other, as if illuminated rather than fading into a distance. It amounts to an exercise in poetic license, sparked by the sensation of the painting emerging from his brush, not to mention the technical exigency. The matter of paint, the immediate reality at hand—as much tactile as optical—was guiding his sensation, not his model.

Commentary on Cézanne by those most directly knowledgeable is telling. “The subject disappears,” said Paul Sérusier. “There is only a [formal] motif.”54 Paul Sérusier quoted in Maurice Denis, “Cézanne” (1907), in Théories, 1890–1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), 252. (Shades of Thoré.) “Painting in itself, the pure act of painting,” wrote Maurice Denis. “With Cézanne, we think only of the painting.”55 Maurice Denis, “De Gauguin, de Whistler et de l’excès des théories” (1905), in Théories, 208; and Denis, “Cézanne,” in Théories, 247. Thoré again, discovering “the value of art itself” in modes of painting materially resistant to whatever ideological references might apply.56 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. In Cézanne’s passages of brilliant color, in Van Gogh’s thick, tactile applications of pigment, the primordial impression, experienced in the very act of painting, became the expressive force that would be acknowledged by the material orientation of twentieth-century artists. In this respect, the impression grounded a lasting countercultural position in its own sensory immediacy.

1 Thoré-Bürger [Théophile Thoré], “Salon de 1863,” in Les Salons (Brussels: Lamertin, 1893), 3:421. On Thoré’s politics, see Frances S. Jowell, “Politique et esthétique: Du citoyen Thoré à William Bürger,” in La critique d’art en France, 1850–1900, ed. Jean-Paul Bouillon (Saint-Etienne: CIEREC, 1989), 25–41; Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left, 1830–1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 181–87. Here and elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. In quoting from nineteenth-century sources, I have retained instances where the gendering of a collective noun is exclusively masculine. »

2 [Arsène Houssaye?], L’artiste 4, 10/2 (July 1847): 30. »

3 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” in Les Salons, 1:445. See also Thoré’s claim that “poetry is not nature but the feeling that nature inspires in the artist”: “Salon de 1844,” in Les Salons, 1:20. »

4 For example, justifying the use of novel terminology, a critic writes of seeking the best “expression to translate the impression received”: Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1834,” in Études sur l’école française (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855), 1:243. »

5 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:425. »

6 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:413–15, italics omitted. »

7 Charles Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” Gazette des beaux-arts 21 (July 1866): 37, 40. »

8 This sense of the impression corresponds to the first and presumably most fundamental of many definitions for “impression” in Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française (Paris: Hachette, 1866), 3:38: “Action de presser sur.” »

9 Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1873), 9:604; Littré, Dictionnaire, 3:38. For Hume’s definition, see David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Lewis Amherst Selby-Bigge (1740; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1: “Those perceptions, which enter [the mind] with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul.” »

10 Littré, Dictionnaire, 3:38. »

11 Émile Littré, “De quelques points de physiologie psychique” (1860), in La science au point de vue philosophique (Paris: Didier, 1873), 312, 314. »

12 Littré, “De quelques points,” 315. »

13 Théodule Ribot, La psychologie anglaise contemporaine (Paris: Ladrange, 1870), 59; Hippolyte Taine, De l’intelligence (1870; repr., Paris: Hachette, 1888), 1:166–69. »

14 Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel, 9:604–5; Georges Guéroult, “Du rôle du movement des yeux dans les émotions esthétiques,” Gazette des beaux-arts 23 (June 1881): 537. »

15 Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “L’exposition du boulevard des Capucines: Les impressionnistes,” Le siècle, April 29, 1874, 3. »

16 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 40. »

17 Jules-Antoine Castagnary, “Salon de 1873,” in Salons (Paris: Charpentier, 1892), 2:86. »

18 Thoré-Bürger, “Exposition universelle de 1867,” in Les Salons, 3:357–58. “Corot has hardly ever made but one and the same landscape, but it is good”: Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1865,” in Les Salons, 3:223. »

19 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1865,” 3:224. »

20 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1864,” in Les Salons, 3:76. »

21 Charles Clément, “Les paysagistes français contemporains” (1853), in Études sur les beaux-arts en France (Paris: Michel Lévey frères, 1869), 336. »

22 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 38. »

23 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 40. »

24 Blanc, “Salon de 1866,” 38. »

25 Ernest Chesneau, “L’école française” (1863), in L’art et les artistes modernes en France et en Angleterre (Paris: Didier, 1864), 195. »

26 Clément, “Les paysagistes français contemporains,” 335. »

27 Another example of this observation: Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1857,” Revue des deux mondes 10 (July 1857): 398–99. »

28 Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867; repr., Paris: Henri Laurens, 1880), 577–78. For an early version of Blanc’s argument, see Gustave Planche, “Salon de 1831,” in Études sur l’école française, 1:38 (critical of Henri Decaisne). »

29 Karl Groos, Die Spiele der Menschen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1899), 8–9; Groos is quoting Bernard Perez, Les trois premières années de l’enfant (1878; repr., Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892), 45. »

30 Perez, Trois premières années de l’enfant, 45. »

31 Perez, Trois premières années de l’enfant, 45–46. »

32 Paul Mantz, Salon de 1847 (Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1847), 96. Mantz approved of Thoré’s politics in principle, but found their application impractical; see Paul Mantz, “Salons de T. Thoré,” Gazette des beaux-arts 24 (April 1868): 403. »

33 Clément, “Paysagistes français contemporains,” 335. »

34 Mantz, Salon de 1847, 95–96. »

35 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:447. »

36 Théophile Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” L’artiste 4, 10/4 (July 1847): 52, italics mine. Thoré was attracted to this art because he regarded Dutch culture as fundamentally democratic. »

37 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:538, italics omitted. »

38 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1847,” 1:477–79. »

39 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1868,” in Les Salons, 3:514. Here, “d’impression” suggests not only the immediate sensation but the first layer of a constructed painting, the element most quickly established. Technically, “peinture d’impression” is paint applied in broad, flat strokes, as in painting a wall. On “peinture d’impression,” see Anthea Callen, The Work of Art: Plein-Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion, 2015), 193. On the factor of quickness, see Richard R. Brettell, Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860–1890 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). »

40 On the critic’s attribution of social content, see Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1845,” in Les Salons, 1:105. »

41 Most likely, this work was exhibited in the Salon of 1870 or had at least been submitted to the jury; see Joachim Pissarro and Claire Durand-Ruel Snollaerts, Pissarro: Catalogue critique des peintures (Paris: Wildenstein Institute, 2005), 2:140–41 (where the title is Maisons à Bougival). »

42 Théodore Duret, “Salon de 1870,” in Critique d’avant-garde (Paris: Charpentier, 1885), 8–9. In 1867 Duret had expressed ambivalence about Corot, separating what for Thoré could be affiliated features, arguing that some of his landscape views were straightforward impressions, whereas others had been altered by his poetic predispositions: Théodore Duret, Les peintres français en 1867 (Paris: Dentu, 1867), 26–28. »

43 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. »

44 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:409–10, italics omitted. For a defense of Desgoffe, see Chesneau, “L’école française,” 263–66. »

45 Thoré-Bürger, “Salon de 1863,” 2:423. »

46 Albert Aurier, “Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh,” Mercure de France 1 (January 1890): 26–27. »

47 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. »

48 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. »

49 Émile Bernard, “Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne et lettres inédits,” Mercure de France 69 (October 1907): 609. »

50 Francis Wey argued that the soft-focus calotype print, as opposed to the crisp daguerreotype plate, “animated” the camera image, affording “the expression of feeling”: Francis Wey, “De l’influence de l’héliographie sur les beaux-arts,” La lumière, February 9, 1851, 2. »

51 Taine, De l’intelligence, 2:189. »

52 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1889; repr., New York: Harper, 1960), 110. »

53 Cézanne’s words, recorded in the entry for January 26, 1906, in Maurice Denis, Journal (Paris: La Colombe, 1957–59), 2:29. »

54 Paul Sérusier quoted in Maurice Denis, “Cézanne” (1907), in Théories, 1890–1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique (Paris: Rouart et Watelin, 1920), 252. »

55 Maurice Denis, “De Gauguin, de Whistler et de l’excès des théories” (1905), in Théories, 208; and Denis, “Cézanne,” in Théories, 247. »

56 Thoré, “Galerie de M. le Comte de Morny,” 52. »

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