Colour and the Impressionists I, Vincent Van Gogh

In 1886, Vincent moved from the Netherlands to join his brother Theo, an art dealer, in Paris.  He settled in the Bohemian neighbourhood of Montmartre.  Here, he soon became familiar with the work of Pari’s most radical contemporary art movement:  the Impressionists.

The fundamental innovation the Impressionists brought to Western art wad their treatment of collour.  According to the principle of naturalism, the painter’s job is to create a convincing representation of reality.  Trying to do so, he or she immediately comes up against a difficult philosophical quandary:  to make their convincing representation of nature, do they depict the object how they know it to be or do they depict it as they see it?  If they are painting a man, do they always depict him with two eyes, feet, hands, etc, or do they show him how they see him from their point of view, where he might be in profile, showing one eye, one foot, one hand?  At the end of the Medieval period, European artists decided on the latter.

To depict things as they appear, rather than how we know them to be, artists needed tools to mimic the way the eye sees the world.  One of the most powerful of these was linear perspective, invented by artists working during the early Renaissance (C. 1400).  Among many others Pietro Perugino would create naturalistic, realistic images by painting from a single, specific point of view – so if, from their vantage point, the man was in profile, he would be painted with one eye, and, if there was a house behind him, it would be painted as small as it would appear at the distance to the human eye, to indicate exactly how far away it was.

The Impressionists pushed naturalism further, painting not just the shapes of things as they saw them, but also the colours, attempting to capture the transitory effects (or the impression) of light and shade on the colour of objects.  Think for a second of the colour of a haystack.  I bet you’re thinking of something rich and golden or bright and yellow. 

Now, take a look at Monet’s haystacks in the image, notice how they’re painted at different times of the day, and notice the colours that come in: when it’s night, we have these blues, when it’s dawn, pink streaks pass through the fields and the hay, and when it’s sunset, they burn with intense oranges and reds.  

Monet used colour to suggest light; his brushwork was full of broken colours (small dabs of different colours placed next to each other, instead of mixed to create shimmering effects) or colour streaked through the canvas to depict the fleeting effects of changing light and shadows.