The Thames at Westminster Bridge, Edward Monet
(1871)
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
Georges Seurat, (1886)
Girl with a Watering Can,
Pierre Auguste Renoir
(1876)
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A movement in modern art that had its inception in the 1860s and received
its name after its first exhibition in 1874, impressionism "was characterized
above all by its concern with fleeting effects of light and motion, its
disregard of outlines and distaste for sombre colours, its original angles
of vision, and its general aura of delicate yet mundane gaiety" (The
Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought). Its best known adherents
included Claude
Monet, Auguste
Renoir, Camille
Pissarro, and Alfred
Sisley.
The 19th Century art movement known as "Impressionism"
interested Barfield as a chapter in the evolution
of consciousness as revealed in/recorded in art.
Now for the Impressionist painters this [their
participation
in the creation of phenomena] became a real experience. They really painted
nature in the light of the eye, as no other painters had done before them.
They were striving to realize in consciousness the normally unconscious
activity of "figuration" itself. They did
not imitate; they expressed "themselves" inasmuch as they painted nature
as the representation of Man. They will
serve as a reminder -though they are not the only one--that the rejection
of original participation may mean, not
the destruction but the liberation of images. (SA 132)
See in particular
Saving the Appearances,
Chap. XIX. |
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