Impressionist masters radiate at The Louvre Abu Dhabi
For our first illustration of nature, we spotted ‘The Beach at Trouville’ by Eugène Louis Boudin. This specific masterpiece capitalized on the effects of light and atmosphere and how the overcast sky completes the image. He often paid great attention to the weather conditions whenever he was outdoors, and this was exemplified here to the extreme.
The renowned French visual artist Henri Matisse once claimed “Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.” And he might just be right, for the revolutionary movement which sprung up in the 19th century served to showcase the flourishing social advances and booming economic progress of its time.
This was best encapsulated in Impressionism: Pathways to Modernity, a lauded exhibit at the prestigious Louvre Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with the esteemed Paris-based Musée d’Orsay, a depository known for the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the entire world.
Touted as one of the most significant Impressionist demonstrations far from its home country France, it introduced — are you ready for this — a sterling selection of over 100 paintings, 40 sketches, and 20 photographs.
‘The Coeur-Volant Hill in Marly in the Snow,’ by Alfred Sisley, 1877-1878, oil on canvas.
But first, let’s take a walk back into history.
The era was fresh from the coattails of the Industrial Revolution and perhaps the aftershocks of the Spanish Civil War and the July Revolution which toppled King Charles X of France, a conservative who favored old nobles. A group of like-minded France-based artists banded together and instead of boxed-in studio portraits, they wished to represent the world around them, far away from the clutches of art academics.
This artistic rebellion produced a brand-new approach to creation — with an emphasis on sunlit nature and the ever-changing lifestyle, plus technical innovations such as the railway and photography.
The result was the Impressionist Movement — a development where paintings became more free-spirited and genuine, nonconforming to the scholastic and aesthetic conventions then.
And thus, the Louvre Abu Dhabi aired the epitome of the objets d’art — some on loan, while others unveiled to the public just for the special occasion.
Here are some of our favorites:
There were various self-portraits of Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pisarro, plus a portrait of William Sisley by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Each of these snaps of still life included a brief biography of these great artists and their contributions to the beginnings of Impressionism.
