The younger crowd went to Tanguy’s little shop, then at 14 rue
Clauzel, not least because the kindly old Breton was willing to exchange
colours and brushes for paintings no matter how wild and unsellable they
might prove. His generosity was especially needed in the early years follow-
ing the upheaval, when the official art world, taking its tone from a highly
conservative government, closed its doors more firmly than before against
any form of experiment or deviation from the established ethos set down by
the Académie and the Salon, once again pre—eminent as the guardians of
approved culture. The problem for these defenders of the status quo was the
age-old allure of the new and the irrepressible desire of the young to contra-
dict their elders.
All over Paris, in schools and studios, art students bored with the daily
grind of learning the academic disciplines, gossiped and joked and passed on
news of the outrageous things that were being done by artists who were
openly in defiance of the rules. The best known of these outrageous icono-
clasts were called Impressionists, a name which seemed to say it all, sug-
gesting something intriguingly unclear and ambiguous where the great
history painters were solid, bold and straightforward. No wonder the word
itself was enough to evoke ideas of mystery and romance in those who had
never seen any of their works. Even Henri, safely immurged so Adéle hoped,
Princeteau°s studio, heard the whispers and longed to know more about
these painters who were said to daub pigment like children and who made
their canvases so bright they hurt the eyes.
Things had moved on from the days when Monet had been content to
work alongside Courbet, admiring the older man's instinctive attempts to
lighten his palette. Since then the technique had become far more self-
conscious with Monet and a group of like-minded friends studying the work
of optical scientists like Chevreul, Helmholtz and Rood in an attempt to
understand the fundamental laws that govern colour and light. What Monet
and his friends discovered were often practices they had been edging towards
while painting outside, direct from nature, but which were now reinforced
and carried out to a more confident degree. The scientists showed how
colours tend to tinge the space around them, which to Monet and his friends
meant that shadows should cease to be nothing more than dark patches and
Jshould reflect colour from the surrounding areas. The resulting brightness
was further enhanced by the use of complementary colours — red and green,
blue. and orange — side by side, which made the canvas shimmer, and this
brilliance was further enhanced by the technique of ‘optical mixing’ where-
by short dabs of pure colour were set down beside each other so that at a
distance they appeared to combine, yet without the lifelessness that often
resulted when the pigment was mixed on the palette before being spread on
a canvas. Taken a stage further, allowing some of the white underpainting
appear between the dabs of pure colour and the result was, in the vocab-
ulary of the time, ‘luminous’, especially when set against the heavy, deliber-
impertinent sunny canvases that were not only glaringly bright but which
dared to depict scenes of ordinary life such as people having picnics or boat-
ing on the Seine.
Yet despite this implacabe opposition, by the time Henri began his stud-
ies, there was hardly an art student in the city who was not aware that the
new school existed. Even Princeteau must have learned about them as far
back as 1874 when Monet and his colleagues decided to organise their own
exhibition in what had been the studios of the photographer Nadar on the
Thirty artists took part, lesser names clustered round the central group of the
movement that the exhibition gave birth to: Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste
Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro. Auguste Renoir and his brother
Edmond seem to have done most of the hard work. Auguste chose a back-
ground of reddish—brown wallpaper and organised the hanging while
Edmond dealt with the catalogue, doing his best to persuade the participants
to buck up the affair by choosing more exciting titles. Monet was the least
helpful in this regard, tediously dubbing his canvases exactly what they
were, a railway station or a street name. Under Edmondls influence he
renamed a hazy river view, painted near Le I-lavre in 1872, Impression:
Sunrise and when an irate critic seized on this passing invention and
launched an attack on these mere ‘Impressionists’, what had been a loose
gathering of young painters coalesced into a group.
Five further exhibitions were held by the new Impressionists up to 1881,
the year after I-Ienri’s studies began, and while there is no record that he
attended the last show, it is hard to believe that he could have avoided all
knowledge of it. Though some of the more diehard critics continued to rant
about this impertinent new art, a surprising number had already been won
over and while the great names of the Académie fought a tough rearguard
action to ban such stuff from their studios, it was not long before hints of the
Impressionist technique, the short little dabs of pure bright colour, were
spreading across the canvases of the capital’s art students at a speed that was
clearly unstoppable.
Today, we tend to assume that something so radical and so rapid must
have shocked everyone but what the Impressionists were doing only seems
so revolutionary if their small, light, bright scenes of people dancing and
boating are placed beside the great dark ponderous episodes from ancient
Greece, Imperial Rome and the Courts of the Middle Ages that dominated
the Salon. If one moves away from that David and Goliath contest, compar-
ing the new art to other sorts of work that was also painted from direct con-
tact with nature, the shock is far less brutal. Monet and his band were only
one of several groups that had branched out from the line that links Vernet,
Céricault, Delacroix and Courbet, and however and whenever Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec first came across the new school it would be safe to assume
that it would hardly have horrified him. Accustomed as he was to Princeteau
and those like him, whose studies of animals were done from the motif with
quick sharp brush-strokes and a notable lack of Academic ‘finish’, neither
the Impressionists’ open—air practice nor their tiny strokes of colour would
have seemed especially unusual. Discovering this new school was less likely
to have radicalised Henri°s technique than to have simply confirmed what
was already standard practice. To the question Was Toulouse-Lautrec an
Impressionist, the answer has to be no, though his style was certainly impres-
sionistic, which is not quite the same thing.
Even the subjects normally chosen by the Impressionists would not have
seemed strange to Henri. Following Manet, the Impressionists had taken up
Baudelaire’s challenge to be painters of modern life, but their depictions of
the pleasures of the rising urban bourgeoisie, the dances and picnics and the
bustling boulevards and busy railway termini that were central to their lives,
was hardly very radical. Monet may have worked alongside Courbet in
Normandy but his subsequent art reflects little of the older man’s political
concerns. None of the Impressionists joined Courbet when the Commune was
declared and far from being as offensively revolutionary as their first critics
claimed, scenes like their Sunday-afternoon boating parties, hazy under the
sun-dappled surface of their canvases, only create the illusion that life under
the new Republic was very pleasant indeed. Even Pissarro, who held gen-
uinely radical political views, only later expressed them in his art, and while
l\./Ionet and Renoir might express radical opinions, as most artists did at the
time, such things were not allowed to seep into their paintings. Theirs is a
dreamy, unblemished view of fin-de-siécle life that found its sweetest expres-
sion in the work Renoir was doing in the 18'/Os when he lived in
Montinartre, work that shows not a hint of the political sentiments that are
usually associated with the home of the Commune and the heartland of rev-
olutionary theory.
Far from sympathising with Courbet's activities during the siege, Renoir
did everything possible to avoid joining in. Finding himself trapped in Paris
when the Commune was declared and threatened with compulsory enlist-
ment in its defence forces, Renoir persuaded an old friend, who had been ele-
vated to police commissioner under the new regime, to issue him yvith a pass
that would get him through the lines and out ‘to his mother s house in
Louve where he spent the rest of the conflict painting the surround-
mg countryside as if nothing were happening. ‘They were madmen,’ he said
somewhat ruefully, ‘but they had about them the little flame that never dies.’
With peace restored Renoir and his wife to moved into the outskirts of Montmartre
where they stayed for over forty years — at one point with a studio in the
Batueau Lavoir, the disused laundry where Picasso would later work.
Every weekend Renoir would climb to the summit of the Butte where
one of the surviving windmills, the Moulin de la Galette, still stood. Far from
milling flour for the little flat cakes after which it was named, the windmill
air bar which in turn had evolved into a large dance area, outside under the trees.
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