The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution

Waldemar Januszczak continues his investigation of the Impressionists by taking us outdoors to their most famous locations. Although Impressionist pictures often look sunny and relaxed, achieving this peaceful air was hard work. Trudging through fog, wind and rain, across treacherous coastal rocks and knee-deep snow, Waldemar shows how the famous spontaneity of the Impressionists is thoroughly misleading. This episode visits the French riverside locations that Monet loved to paint, and where Renoir captured the bonhomie of modern life. Waldemar also introduces a number of technical and practical developments of the age which completely revolutionised Impressionist painting - the invention of portable easels; the use of hogs hair in paint brushes; as well as the introduction of the railway through France. And a scientific demonstration in a Swedish snowdrift explains just how right the Impressionists were to paint brightly coloured shadows in their winter scenes, despite being accused of hallucinating at the time. Finally, Januszczak explains Cezannes part in the Impressionist story from his dark and challenging early work to his first rural landscapes in France, and then his departure from Paris and separation from the Impressionist gang.

This episode takes a closer look at the late years of Impressionism, using the last show these artists did together as a starting point. Waldemar looks in considerable depth at the work of Georges Seurat, taking into consideration his academic training at the Beaux-Arts School in Paris and the artists that influenced him, such as Piero della Francesca and Puvis de Chavannes. There is also an insight into the complex but fascinating world of optics and art, and the ways in which the Impressionists were using the new discoveries in light and eyesight to influence their work. A fascinating after-image experiment brings to life the ways in which our own eyes see colour, both in its presence and its absence. Van Goghs time in Paris, a period very little is known about, is also covered, charting the incredible journey the artist made from his brown and dull canvases to the splendid colour and light that pervaded his work on the cusp of his departure for the South of France. The film finishes with a revisiting of Monet and his later waterlily paintings in the Orangerie in Paris. Waldemar investigates how a bad case of cataracts was responsible for a seismic shift in his colour palette and his brushstrokes. Spending time with an ophthalmologist, he finds out how old age and a fairly common ailment of the eyes caused Impressionism to shift and become radical again at the turn of the century and into the 20th century.