The Lens of Impressionism - Photography and Painting along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874 - Beau Livre

The Normandy Coast, with its craggy coastline and medieval fishing villages, has long captured the interest of artists. Its seascapes are featured in the work of Impressionist masters Monet, Manet, and Boudin. Its seafaring life is well-documented in the work of such writers as Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant. Through a stunning selection of paintings, photographs, and drawings, The Lens of Impressionism argues that a unique convergence of forces - social, artistic, technological, and commercial - along the Normandy coast profoundly impacted the development of early Impressionism and made Normandy a nexus for photographers and the avant-garde painters of the later nineteenth century.
Many photographers worked in the region prior to or at the same time as the early Impressionists. When the Impressionist painters began their work, they were already aware of the kind of images photographers could produce - how boats, beaches, and the sea itself could be captured. So the same iconic scenes and motifs appear in both the photographs and the paintings of the period. As author Carole McNamara writes, "Impressionist painting has always endeavored to convey motion, but new possibilities and solutions were presented by photography...
if painters were to continue to create works that had relevance to modern audiences, then the expression of time - of "instantaneity" - would become an increasingly important consideration in their own work." The framing dates are 1850, when artists began photographing in Normandy and the emerging impact of photography and its aims were debated vigorously in artistic circles, and 1874, the year in which Claude Monet's painting Impression : Sunrise was exhibited, marking the major new direction in French painting, and the debut of Impressionism - a name initially given in critical derision.
The Lens of Impressionism explores the dialogue between the two media and the backdrop against which both evolved. It presents more than 100 paintings, photographs, and drawings by some of the most treasured artists in the Western canon - Courbet, Jongkind, Manet, Monet, Whistler, and Degas among them, together with the work of such pioneering photographers as Gustave Le Gray and Henri Le Secq.