Impressionism: Manet

Impressionism: Manet

Impressionism was based on light and the subject that was being painted or drawn. Instead of creating smoothly blended somber colors, the standards for French painting, the Impressionist placed separate touches of vibrantly contrasting colors directly onto the canvas without prior mixing on the palette. If you look closely at a small section of an Impressionist painting, you will see many individual brush strokes of varying colors, placed side by side with no blending a jumble of color daubs. But when you move farther away, your eyes mix the colors to produce a recognizable subject with shimmering effects of light. The artist attempted to paint what the eye actually sees, rather than what the brain interprets from visual cues.

By examining Manet’s 1874 Venetian canal paintings, we can see not only the effect of his Arcachon work on his portrayal of water but also the distinctions between his brushstrokes for slow-moving water and those for a lively sea Manet’s brushwork does appear swift in the strokes used to portray water. You can see how the artist’s variety of colors and dense interplay of strokes does bring some three-dimensionality to otherwise nearly motionless water.

He incorporates a wide range of hues, including atypical water colors like tan and green, to catch the viewer’s eye. Manet’s water also draws our attention with its short disjointed strokes that bring a sense of three-dimensionality to the canal and make the water the scene’s most animated feature. Because the gondola itself is not generating motion, the animated water in Venice—The Grand Canal comes entirely from the artist’s brush. By overlapping strokes in a dense array of multihued