Claude Monet. Water Lily Pond, 1900. Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection.
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The Art Institute’s holdings of late 19th-century French art are among the largest and finest in the world and feature some of the most well-known and well-loved works in the museum. The works included here are highlights from our wide-ranging collection.
Pierre-August Renoir’s painting of two boaters and their female friend enjoying a lunch alfresco is the picture of idyllic pleasure. Renoir likely created this painting during an extended stay at the restaurant it depicts—the Maison Fournaise, along the Seine. He completed many scenes of boating life during this period.
Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch)
NARRATOR: In the late nineteenth century the picturesque little towns on the river Seine just west of Paris became popular destinations for Parisians wanting to enjoy a day out. This is one of many paintings made by Renoir at the restaurant Fournaise, which overlooked the river. The two men and a woman sit on one of the restaurant’s river terraces enjoying the summer afternoon after a leisurely lunch. They may all have spent the morning in more active pursuits. The man to the left was a well-known patron of a swimming establishment nearby. His friend to the right is dressed in a rower’s white shirt and pants, and their companion wears a female boater’s blue costume, as does the woman we see through the trellis. Beyond her a racing boat cuts through the water at a faster pace. On the terrace Renoir evokes the atmosphere of relaxation and quietness as the party lingers over wine and fruit. His soft, loose brushwork perfectly conveys the slightly hazy afternoon light. It filters through the trellis to fall glowingly on the men’s white costumes, and the thicker paint application highlights the edges of the wine glasses and decanter with points of dazzling dancing brilliance.
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In this work, Berthe Morisot captures the essence of modern life in understated terms—rendering her subject with soft, feathery brushstrokes in nuanced shades of lavender, pink, blue, white, and gray. The composition resembles a visual tone poem, orchestrated with such perfumed and rarified motifs as brushed blonde hair, satins, powder puffs, and flower petals. Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist group shows; this painting was included in the fifth exhibition, in 1880, where her work received great acclaim.
This monumental view of a bustling Parisian intersection is considered Caillebotte’s masterpiece. In it, the artist captures a scene of sweeping modernity that conveys the momentary quality of everyday life, depicting fashionable city dwellers strolling down the street on a rainy day. The painting’s rigorous perspective and grand scale pleased Parisian audiences, while its asymmetry, unusually cropped forms, and rain-washed mood stimulated a more radical sensibility.
Paris Street; Rainy Day (The Essentials Tour)
GLORIA GROOM: Because of the near-life-size scale of the figures, it’s a painting that one wants to just walk into.
NARRATOR: This is ‘Paris Street; Rainy Day,’ Gustave Caillebotte’s largest painting. Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.
GLORIA GROOM: You think about this almost in a film sequence, and that somehow it’s just been stopped and these figures are frozen.
There are many, many figures in this painting, and our eye is first focused on this amazingly elegant couple. Then when you start to look around, you see that there’s a man on the right who’s cut off by the end of the picture frame. And it looks like he’s definitely going to collide with this couple and someone’s going to have to move their umbrella. His elbow looks like it’s going to go straight into her.
That’s also Caillebotte playing around with the idea of photography, which was so important in the 19th century. But photography would not have been able to capture what he’s done. It would be another ten years before you could really capture a figure walking in an environment such as this. So you have that idea of photography, but it’s really Caillebotte using the idea and making something that only a painting could do.
NARRATOR: Here Caillebotte shows off everything new in Paris in 1877. The clothes are the latest fashion. The retractable umbrella was just invented. Even the cityscape is new. A decades-long renovation had transformed the winding medieval streets of Paris into grand boulevards, like the ones you see here.
GLORIA GROOM: And so while this is very much celebration of the new Paris, it’s a Paris that speaks to us today. Because this is the same Paris that we see, and there’s a familiarity about it, and a nostalgia when we see it, that we understand this is Paris because this is the Paris we see today.
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The hat—a prime symbol of the modern bourgeois woman in the works of Edgar Degas—also functions as a metaphor for the artistic process in this painting of a millinery shop. Degas has scraped and repainted the canvas around the woman’s hands and the hat she holds to create a sense of movement. Nearby hats also remain unfinished—awaiting their finishing touches in the shop, they are partially painted in broad strokes, as if Degas himself hasn’t quite finished working on them.
The Millinery Shop
NARRATOR: Edgar Degas was fascinated by Parisian millinery shops with their lavish displays of colorful hats and their elegant shop girls and customers. This young woman who’s inspecting a hat at arm’s length might possibly be a client, but it’s perhaps more likely a shop assistant. Douglas Druick, president and Eloise W. Martin director of the Art Institute of Chicago.
DOUGLAS DRUICK: If indeed the young woman is a milliner working her craft, the hat that she’s working on seems not to have been finished. The whole question of finished and unfinished— in other words, when the picture was completed— was something that was very close to Degas’ practice and even in this picture some of the other hats that are on the stands seem less finished than the blue hat and the pink hat with the gold ribbon and that wonderful hat with green ribbon. What’s also interesting though in terms of the ambiguity in this picture is Degas identification with the whole milliner theme, because Degas was born into an affluent banking family. However, as an artist he, like the milliners, spent his time creating things with his hands and using materials. And I think that this picture is, in a way, a metaphor for many of the issues that Degas was confronting himself as an artist.
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The two girls depicted in this painting, clutching oranges tossed to them from the crowd as gifts, likely performed as acrobats in their father’s famed Cirque Fernando, in Paris. Although they are painted standing in the center of a circus ring, Renoir actually painted them in his studio, where he could take full advantage of natural sunlight.
Acrobats at the Cirque Fernando (Francisca and Angelina Wartenberg)
NARRATOR: Renoir painted these two young acrobats at a popular Parisian circus in 1879. Douglas Druick, president and Eloise W. Martin director of the Art Institute of Chicago.
DOUGLAS DRUICK: The younger sister stands holding the oranges, which the appreciative audience is throwing to the girls after their performance, and the older sister is gesturing to the crowd. In fact, they look more like dancers having _______ finished performance rather than acrobats and this emphasis on the grace with which they hold themselves rather than on the contortions of their performance as acrobats is typical of the way Renoir approached his subject when making a painting. He was interested in conveying a sense of beauty and harmony in the picture.
NARRATOR: Renoir’s scene is not illuminated by the harsh gaslight that was then used in circuses—
DOUGLAS DRUICK: Rather we see these two young girls depicted as if they are out of doors with a very gentle light, which draws attention to the golden details of their costume and their hair ribbons and their boots so that we get a chromatic harmony and great delicacy.
NARRATOR: Renoir’s close-up view of the acrobats is that of an audience member with opera glasses, such as the well-dressed man to the upper right.
DOUGLAS DRUICK: And, so, this is the type of subject, which in the late 1870s when Renoir made this represented the quintessence of modern fashionable life in Paris."
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Set in the Parisian suburb of Chatou, Two Sisters (On the Terrace) features a pair of young women who were not actually sisters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir juxtaposed the girls’ solid, life-size figures against a dreamy, fantastic landscape. The basket of yarn to their left evokes the artist’s palette, and the girls’ contrasting expressions—the elder’s far-off stare and the younger’s eager stillness—make this “sisterly” moment feel casually genuine.
Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
NARRATOR: This lyrical portrayal of two girls by Auguste Renoir is one of the most popular works in the Art Institute. Renoir painted it in 1881, setting it on the terrace of the restaurant Fournaise, which overlooked a modest stretch of the river Seine just outside Paris. By 1881 he had been visiting the restaurant and painting its fashionable Parisian visitors and beautiful surroundings for more than ten years. Here, Renoir depicts an elegant young woman sitting in the warm sunshine accompanied by a little girl. They are not, in fact, sisters, but unrelated models despite the painting’s title. The young woman wears a female boater’s blue flannel costume, which she has enlivened with a cherry red hat and a cluster of bright spring flowers on the bodice. These elements with the little girl’s flower laden hat and their basket of wool lend the image an intense vibrant quality. The hats and wool basket are built up with thick swaths of paint. They contrast strikingly with the girls’ porcelain-like faces, whose rosy coloring is painted with tiny brush strokes, giving their skin a smooth delicate effect.
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There’s a trick at work in this painting by Édouard Manet of a woman sitting in a Parisian café—the scene behind her is actually one of Manet’s paintings, and the table, magazine, and other objects are props set up in Manet’s studio. This highly Impressionistic painting, with its free brushstrokes and light colors, is typical of Manet’s later works.
Woman Reading
Narrator: Do you sense anything odd about this painting? [pause] Notice the outfit the woman is wearing. She seems a bit bundled up for the spring background behind her, right? That’s not a coincidence. Here, we find Manet pulling a little trick. Curator, Gloria Groom.
Gloria Groom: Scholars have come to realize that this is not a real garden at all, but is rather one of Manet’s own paintings. And the way we’ve come to this conclusion is because of this blue element that you see just to the right of the woman reading, which is actually a water pail.
Narrator: Manet used this same backdrop in paintings from the 1880s. In fact, you can see another example of it in the portrait of Madame Gamby also in this gallery.
By 1880, Manet had become less mobile due to illness, and could not longer make it out to the cafes, parks, and other Parisian scenes that he loved painting. Instead, he resorted to recreating the scenes in his studio. Here he combines garden scene likely painted while in the suburbs with a modern Parisian women drinking a beer, whose portrait was done back in Paris.
Gloria Groom: The whole concept is that she is a modern woman. She has her bock of beer, she’s out by herself, she’s concentrating not on the latest political news but probably on what she’s going to go consume next at the Galeries Lafayette. And so she’s the picture of a fashionable Parisian—a type that he said he wanted to show in all of their beauty, in all of their grace and glamour.
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This scene of the Grande Jatte, an island in the Seine just outside of Paris where city residents sought rest and recreation, is considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work. Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884, reworking the original and completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches. Inspired by research in optical and color theory, he juxtaposed tiny dabs of colors that, through optical blending, form a single and, he believed, more brilliantly luminous hue.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (The Essentials Tour)
NARRATOR: This may be the most iconic work of art in the Art Institute. Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.
GLORIA GROOM: What you see are a lot of different figures. And these figures represent different walks of life. They’ve gathered here on the banks of the Seine on a Sunday afternoon, and they’re in their Sunday best, most of them.
It seems very alive, because of the color. But no one is really moving. There is really a stillness. Seurat wanted to extract from modern life, to distill it. And to make it, as he said, like the Parthenon frieze, but using modern people in all their traits.
NARRATOR: There are mysteries here: on the left, the boater with the cap seems disproportionately large in relation to the couple seated next to him. Why is the little girl in orange the only one captured in movement? What are those two orange shapes at the far right?
GLORIA GROOM: For us,it’s an enigmatic painting. It’s one that we return to again and again. You never get tired of it. Because you’re always finding something else that is unusual, that makes you think differently about what you thought you knew. And that, I think, is the sign of a great painting.
NARRATOR: Seurat used a technique called ‘pointillism,’ and it’s what he’s famous for. He painted in tiny little dots, often in complementary colors.
GLORIA GROOM: If you were an avant-garde artist in late 19th century, you would be thinking about complementaries on the color wheel. So purple and yellow, and blue and orange, and red and green.And when you lay them down next to each other, and you don’t blend them,they have a flickering quality.
And so he breaks up the surface with these little dots of pigment. And that is what is his completely different approach to painting. And every artist after ‘the Grande Jatte’ had to reckon with what a painting should be, and how can we now accept this new technique.
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In 1888, Vincent van Gogh moved into a new house in Arles, France which he dubbed the “Studio of the South” in the hope that friends and artists would join him there. He immediately set to work on the house and painted this bedroom scene as a part of his decorating scheme. This sun-drenched composition with its vivid palette, dramatic perspective, and dynamic brushwork seems ready to burst with an intense, nervous vitality. Van Gogh liked this image so much that he painted three distinct versions—the other two are held in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
The Bedroom (The Essentials Tour)
NARRATOR: Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture.
GLORIA GROOM: I think one of the reasons that people are so drawn to this is because of the subject matter. I mean, Van Gogh is painting his bedroom with his paintings in it, and the furniture that he purchased.
NARRATOR: This was Vincent Van Gogh’s bedroom in his house in Arles, where he lived in the late 1880s. There he’d dreamt of establishing an artists’ collective—a “Studio of the South.” Initially he’d filled with great optimism about the endeavor and the idea of finally finding a place to call home.
The room itself is simple, almost austere. In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote:
ACTOR (VINCENT VAN GOGH): You’ll probably find the interior the ugliest, an empty bedroom with a wooden bed and two chairs—yet I’ve painted it twice on a large scale.
NARRATOR: Van Gogh, in fact, considered this painting one of his very best. Curator Gloria Groom.
GLORIA GROOM: He makes it look so interesting and inviting, and at the same time, [rather discomforting. The way the paint is laid on, the brokenness of it. The extreme radicalness of splayed-out floorboards. There’s a kind of…I wouldn’t say creepiness, but definitely unease, unsettledness about it.
NARRATOR: That unease likely relates to Van Gogh’s state of mind at the time. He painted this work after he’d had a mental breakdown, left the house, and had been hospitalized for mental illness.
GLORIA GROOM: He’s in the asylum. [His] dreams have been shattered. He knows he will never, ever have that kind of home of his own …it’s a bedroom that has furnishings as you might imagine in any bedroom, but the way it is painted makes it alive. Gives it another sense of excitement that we just don’t think about in art of that period. It is very unusual.
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