Donna and I Looked at Exhibitionists in D.C.!

Do Donna and I like seeing Impressionist art? Did painter Edgar Degas have a thing for ballerinas?

Yes and yes.

So when we heard that the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. would be the only U.S. stop for an international touring show featuring the works from the first exhibition of Impressionism, in 1874, we made sure to see it. We went the Monday after Thanksgiving, when there were no throngs of student-field-trippers, and made a pre-holiday lunch-and-a-show date of it.

The term Impressionism was coined by art critic Louis Leroy during that first show, which was sort of a protest by artists whose non-conformist works had been rejected by the Salon de Paris, the annual show organized by the powerful and conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts. Leroy used the term derisively in response to a painting by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise.

The painting shows a busy seaport, looking across the water to the docks. The boats and their masts are hard to discern through the darkness as the red sun peers through the smoggy sky. Monet paints the sun’s reflection on the choppy water as a series of parallel red-orange brushstrokes, and the masts likewise are vague representations.

Impression, Sunrise is the first painting you see in the exhibition, and it is remarkable. As with many of the works, from a distance you see the scene clearly, but when you are within inches, it’s just a collection of blobs of paint.

The show we visited included more than 50 paintings from the original show, by Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Pissarro. The current exhibit also featured many paintings that were shown at the Salon de Paris in 1874, and the contrast in styles is often stark: the paintings that were accepted for the Salon are realistic, highly detailed, with barely visible brushstrokes, and often depicted historically significant events or people, while the Impressionist works often depicted outdoor scenes, common events and subjects, and incorporated a style much more evocative than precise.

We saw dozens of incredible works that we had only ever seen in books, and it took our breath away. In the spring, we visited Paris and saw where Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, and others lived and painted, giving us a little perspective on the origins of these priceless works of art.

After a couple hours of wandering from room to room along with mostly other retirees we stopped for a grand lunch at the nearby Capital Grille restaurant, then headed home, our minds and stomachs full.

Here are a few more paintings from the show...