It was not a private meditation or preliminary study but a product of the painter’s very personal interaction with the world that he was happy to share with anyone who derived pleasure from simply looking at what he had done. The most innovative thing about Monet’s picture is that, spontaneous sketch as it is, the artist signed and dated it, and submitted it to a public exhibition.
Some of Cox’s late oil paintings, executed in the 1850s, were, like Constable’s, known in Paris and had a measurable influence on the French. (Fontainebleau artists, too, had been called ‘impressionists’ in their day.) Much of their practice was derived from ideas that had been demonstrated by British artists as early as the 1820s and 1830s: John Constable, David Cox and Richard Parked Bonington, who spent most of his tragically short active life in France. The Impressionists were based in and around Paris, as their predecessors in the School of Fontainebleau had been in the 1850s. They have been celebrated ever since as originators, though of course they were really picking up and taking a stage further a movement that had been in progress for the last half-century or more. The leading figures apart from Monet were Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
One or two small boats are rather more clearly discernible against the luminosity of the water, but nearly everything is implied rather than explicitly stated: an impression indeed.īecause this exhibition launched, and gave a name to, a group of artists who changed the way painting was performed, it is taken as the starting-point of something utterly new – indeed of ‘Modernism’ itself. We glimpse the hulls and masts of ships, and distant factory chimneys sending their smoke to combine with the mist, all swallowed up in an early-morning haze, with the sun an occluded red disc reflected in water that shimmers in the half-light. This is not an exotic location, rather a very familiar one seen in conditions that render it strange and intriguing. In spite of its atmospheric generalisation, the picture does indeed represent a particular place: the port at Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine on the north coast of France, the town of Monet’s birth. This is partly because its title – used by Monet to avoid a name that might suggest it was a reliable description of a place – was adopted by critics to label the work not only of Monet himself but of his colleagues in the show: they became the ‘Impressionists’, and although it began as a derisory joke, the name stuck. This small picture is one of the most celebrated paintings in European art.
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