Rippling water inspired dynamic paintings as impressionism evolved. Using rapid brushstrokes and bold colors they capture the exhilaration of light dancing across restless water and people escaping the heat of days long past.
With many of us sweating in sizzling heat these summer months, take a few moments to enjoy the cool rippling water captured in these paintings.
Gustave Caillebotte Caught Water In Motion
Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) left a powerful body of work including approximately 500 paintings and drawings. Among his many subjects, those that capture the effects of light on rippling water remain my favorites.
While his style is largely realistic, National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC writes “Caillebotte was thrilled by the impressionists’ fresh, radical vision.”
He exhibited with the Impressionists for several years, beginning in 1876 with paintings of the people and places he encountered in and around Paris.
“Featuring skewed perspectives and modern subjects, the canvases reflect the visual drama of the capital — then undergoing radical transformation into a modern metropolis.”
Between 1877 and 1878, Caillebotte made a series of paintings at his family estate in Yerres, France. An avid member of the Parisian sailing club along with his younger brother Martial, he won numerous regattas.
His passion for water sports often became focal points in these paintings with people swimming, fishing, canoeing and sailing.
At the fourth impressionist exhibition in 1879 he entered Skiffs under the name Pésissoires sur L’Yerres (Flat-Bottom Canoes on the Yerres). He utilized the short, broken brushstrokes of Monet and the bold palette of Renoir to capture rippling water in motion.
The canvas also shows his passion for emerging photographic techniques that embraced unique viewpoints and fields of view.
NGA writes:
“…as the rowers zig-zag across the canvas in a bold, diagonal rhythm, they convey a sense of movement, a progression of time and space that reveals Caillebotte’s interest in photography…perhaps inspired by Japanese prints—(he) adopted a dramatic viewpoint perched above the scene to emphasize the precariousness associated with the easily tipped, flat-bottomed skiffs.”
Born into privilege, Caillebotte did not have the burden of paying bills with his art. He used his good fortune to become a patron of the Impressionists who were struggling to gain commercial success. He actively supported Monet and Pissarro. He also purchased many works from his peers, all of which he bequeathed to the French State. They are now in the Musée d’Orsay.
His work was not widely known until museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited his work in the mid-1960s.
Monet And Renoir View La Grenouillére Revelers
La Granouillere Frog Pond presented a difficult subject. Both Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet captured the vibrant excitement of its revelers socializing, boating, swimming and strolling. They worked quickly to capture light glimmering off rippling water and flickering through the trees.
According to Andrea Hope, writer and owner of the Kiama Art Gallery in Australia:
“They painted rapidly with short, comma like brushstrokes, and they juxtaposed sharply contrasting, unmixed colors, which brought a shimmering life to water. It enabled them to portray the transitory effects of light and atmosphere – goals they had been pursuing for years. Both came to value the sketchy, unfinished quality of the work.”
In a letter dated September 25, 1869 to fellow artist Frederic Bazille, Monet writes that he made some “bad sketches (pochades)”. The sketches are hurried. But they vigorously capture the everyday scene as he experienced it. He did not pose his subjects or attempt to clean up the action.
Art historian and author Michael Wilson writes for NationalGallery.org:
“Although in September 1869 he does not seem to have been aware of it, Monet made a radical break-through. Bather at La Grenouillere marks the achievement of a new mode of painting which in the next decade Monet and a handful of others were to champion in the face of determined opposition by the art establishment; that is, working entirely in front of the motif to produce works that are finished, not in the conventional sense, but as a complete self-contained statement of observation.”
The techniques Monet and Renoir advanced that year La Granouillere Frog Pond brought life to the depiction of rippling water.
Egon Schiele Found Shimmering Light
Born in Tulin, Austria in 1890, Egon Schiele’s life was cut short by the Spanish flu in 1918. According to the Leopold Museum, Schiele:
“…managed to create an oeuvre that was both symptomatic of and groundbreaking for his times, making him one of the most formative and colorful figures of Viennese Modernism.” (Leopold Museum)
Author and Art Historian Christopher P. Jones writes:
“ There is a certain raw eloquence to his best-known works: distorted bodies, lines that zigzag, blocks of colour that start and end abruptly, all conveyed with a seasoning of angst… To look at them is to be confronted by something obscene and coarse, and utterly brilliant at the same time.” (Christopher P. Jones)
But among Schiele’s early works are landscapes and dynamic paintings of reflections on rippling water. Schiele painted Hafen von Trieste (Harbour of Trieste) in 1907 when he was 17 years old. Although it is unlike his later works Christopher P. Jones writes:
“Harbour of Trieste uses the sort of decisive line and color that would come to characterize his later unflinching style. As such, this painting can be thought of as a prototype.”
Reflections in the rippling water seem to echo the rigging of the ships in an expression of the turmoil that characterizes much of Schiele’s mature work.
“I wonder if the way that water reflects, and the way reality distorts and wobbles into a series of broken lines and globular shapes, was something of a discovery for the artist at this time. It gave him a visual language he would put to use through many later paintings.”
Wishing you a cool body of rippling water to help you escape the heat.
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