Monet, The Argenteuil Bridge, 1874

We're at the Musee d'Orsay and we're looking at an 1874 Monet. This is The Bridge at Argenteuil, which is a suburb of Paris, where Monet lived briefly and was accessible to Paris by the train. This is the new suburbs that were made possible by not only the wealth of the city but also the industry of this time and the place where people would go to escape the intensity of urban life in Paris and go boating and go fishing and go picnicking. And you can see from this painting how fun that would be here. Yes. What really comes across is just the brilliance of the light on a summer day. Monet is really discarding hundreds of years of tradition of the way that one would paint trees and water and has found a new method for painting outdoor light. Remember, he’s painting this out of doors, too. - This is a painting painted on plain air. - This is the height of impressionism. 1874 is the year of the first impressionist exhibition and Monet has, as you said, discarded an entire tradition, turned painting on its head by saying: What’s important is not the thing that I’m painting, but it is the optical experience of seeing. - That’s right. - That’s critical here. And in order to jettison those hundreds of years of how to paint a landscape Monet asks himself: what am I really seeing? If I put away everything that my brain tells me and everything a person learns at the academy as though my eye were born now and I just looked at the scene, what would I see: patches of green, patches of bluish green, dabs of purple. So that not what I know, you know, not concentrate on formula of academic painting but the actual visual experience of this. So when you look at for instance the English painter Constable you can identify the types of trees, you can identify the hardware that's on the barges that he renders. Here almost nothing is identifiable. It’s not about that, it’s not about understanding what kind of sailboat that is, what kind of sail is rolled up. None of that is important. In fact as you said the water... there are parts of it that could be a green lawn in another context but in fact it’s just the reflective qualities of that surface. Right, he’s thought: Oh, I see a dab of green, I see a dab of blue, you have an intensity of colour, He’s using these colours that would never be seen in academic landscape painting as they would have always been muted, mixed... Here they are just the same in the foreground as they are in the background. For example, that green that we see in the water that’s the shadow of the trees, it’s just as green and just as deep as the tree itself. And so there’s a kind of flattening that happens here that I think looked very radical in the 1870s and the kind of sketchiness and looseness to the brushwork that made it not look like a finished painting. Now, landscape painters had done studies out of doors for hundreds of years. The idea was that Monet was making a completely finished painting out of doors saying: this is done even though it lacked the kind of polish and finish expected by the academy. It was a mere impression.