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French Impressionist Landscape Painting Beyond the Famous Names
Thirty painters showed in the first Impressionist exhibition of April 1874. Most collectors today can name four of them. The rest were working alongside the famous names, painting the same rivers and the same harvest fields in the same years, and their signed Impressionist landscape paintings are still in circulation.
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| 30painters in the first Impressionist exhibition, April 1874 | 8group exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 | 4names that entered the canon and stayed there |
1900 — 1950
A Canon Assembled Half a Century Later |
Adolphe Félix Cals exhibited in April 1874. Stanislas Lépine exhibited there. Armand Guillaumin showed in six of the eight group exhibitions. Albert Lebourg worked the Seine and the Rouen quays through the same decades. They were painting alongside the names everyone now knows, and in several cases were judged by their peers as equals.
The canon as it stands was not settled in the 1870s. It took shape between roughly 1900 and 1950, through American museum acquisitions, a small number of dealers and a handful of influential critics. Painters who lived longest had more time to consolidate a reputation and to leave the large body of work a museum can build a room around. Painters who died early, who worked at a distance from Paris, or who never found a dealer pushing them across the Atlantic, fell outside it for reasons that had little to do with what they had painted.
This is the ordinary way reputations form, and it is worth knowing rather than lamenting. The painters left outside were working the same motifs by the same methods, in oil on canvas, in the same villages along the Seine and the Oise.
Four checks
Buying an Impressionist Landscape Painting |
The category is wide and uneven. Some of these painters worked at a consistently high level and have simply never been reconsidered. Others produced strong and weak canvases in the same years. Four things decide.
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| A verifiable painter | Did he exhibit in his lifetime, is there a documented body of signed and dated work, and does a public collection hold him? A landscape by a recorded painter is a different object from an unsigned canvas in the Impressionist manner. | |
| The reverse | A wax stamp from one of the Paris colourmen places a canvas in the supply network professional painters actually used. Its absence proves nothing. Its presence tells you something. | |
| The same lessons | Where the brushwork, the palette and the compositional habits line up with what Sisley or Pissarro was doing in the same years, you are looking at a painter who learned from the same teachers, often in the same villages. | |
| A subject that reads | Haystacks, riverbanks, snow, poppy fields and village roads are the established motifs of the school and announce themselves at once. An industrial subject or an unnamed village is harder to place, whatever the handling. |
Four names to know
Impressionist Landscape Painters Beyond the Famous Names |
| Adolphe Félix Cals1810 — 1880 | The clearest case in the category. Cals took part in the first Impressionist exhibition of April 1874 alongside Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas and Cézanne, and continued to show with the group afterwards. He was close to Johan Barthold Jongkind, and through him connected to the Normandy coast where much of early Impressionism took shape. He died at Honfleur in 1880. A documented founding Impressionist, held at the Musée d'Orsay and at Rouen, with a coherent body of signed work. His life is set out in our biography of the painter. |
| Armand Guillaumin1841 — 1927 | Guillaumin painted at night and at weekends while holding a day job, and won a lottery in 1891 that let him paint full time. He showed in six of the eight group exhibitions. His landscapes from the 1880s onward, made in the Massif Central and on the Mediterranean coast, are among the most chromatically violent canvases of the whole generation. The reds, oranges and pinks are unmistakable. Orsay, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Minneapolis Institute of Art all hold him. |
| Stanislas Lépine1835 — 1892 | Lépine painted the Seine, the Paris quays and the northern coast in small, quiet, tightly valued canvases. He showed in the first exhibition of 1874 and stayed closer to Corot than to Monet in handling, which is precisely why his pictures read easily to an eye that has come to Impressionism through Barbizon. French and American public collections hold his work. |
| Albert Lebourg1849 — 1928 | Lebourg worked the Seine at Rouen and the Normandy river valleys across five decades, in a silvery atmospheric register close to Sisley. He exhibited with the Impressionists in 1879 and 1880. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen holds a substantial group of his canvases. |
In public collections
Where to See Their Work |
Adolphe Félix Cals, several canvases. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.
Armand Guillaumin, Sunset at Ivry, 1869. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
Armand Guillaumin, Agay. Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach.
Albert Lebourg, The Quay at Rouen. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen.
| → | The next questionWhere did these painters learn to work outdoors?At Barbizon, two decades before 1874, where the modern French landscape was invented. |
Sources. Musée d'Orsay, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bass Museum of Art.
