Up The Seine and Into Impressionist History

I compared  historic compositions with historic locations  while on a barge motoring up the Seine and the Loing rivers out of Paris. I visited and painted the same sites as  19th century French Impressionists like Alfred Sisley, tonalists like Corot, and American Impressionists like Theodore Robinson. My companions were the 15 artists in my workshop.

We compared past masters work with the locations that inspired them and discovered how they relied upon just a few standard compositional forms. Example 1 demonstrates French Impressionist Alfred Sisley’s work and contrasts it with the composition of a seascape (example 2) by Monet. Their compositions are almost mirror images.

example 1, Sisley, Along the Loing.

example 2. Monet, at the Coast.

Painting early in his career Monet uses the same standard  vortex/hub-and-spokes design when visiting the Fontainebleau forest which stretched along our barge’s route (example 3). Fauvist Maurice Vlaminck, a later neo-impressionist in the early 1900s retrofits the same compositional structure as Monet (example 4).

example 3. Early Monet in the Foret Fontainebleau.

example 4. Vlaminck’s neo-impressionist scene.

While walking along the Loing river pathways favored by Sisley and other impressionists I found myself taking photos which relied upon the same design form (example 5 and 6).

example 5. Sisley’s Loing river bank today.

example 6. The Loing river bank at sunset today.

all of the above examples  relied upon the hub-and-spoke or spider-web vortex design. All used low horizons. There are countless examples of this design used by other Impressionists.

In the 17th century Dutch artists like Jacob Van Ruisdael had fine tuned the low-horizon landscape with a sweeping unitary cloudscape overhead. Their landscape was divided by sunlit and shadowed patches. While in Paris last week I took advantage of the views from the top of the contemporary Pompidou Museum. As I swept my camera over the landscape I thought of Van Ruisdael’s view over Amsterdam (example 7). I made my  Paris rooftop vista painting in response (example 8).I continued to find similar Van Ruisdael compositions as walked and floated up the Seine and Loing.  The photo you see in example 9 demonstrates how I repurposed Van Ruisdael’s design concepts.

example 7.  Van Ruisdael’s view over Amsterdam,1662.

example 8. my painting vista over Paris .

example 9. a photo of Paris down the Seine.