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"The National Gallery’s exhibition on the first Impressionist show is serious, elegant, and packed with beauties.
This past April, I started a series of stories about Impressionism, the movement launched — unofficially, anecdotally, and circumstantially — in April 150 years ago at an exhibition in Paris of around 200 works by 30 artists, some renegades, some misfits, some mainstream, some simply mad as hell. What is now called the first Impressionist salon — there were to be eight, the last in 1886 — ran from April 15 to May 15, 1874.
Enough by-the-numbers. The collective was called the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc., a joint-stock company whose investors — the artists, painters, sculptors, printmakers, and whatever et cetera slapped down a few sous — could display and sell works of their own choosing, unjuried by the heavy hand of official taste.
This is my fifth and my last Impressionism-anniversary story. It’s not a case of saving the best for last, but Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., is the pièce de résistance. It’s so bracing, so keen and sharp, it alone might compel the Swamp to drain itself, conceding that art invigorates and heals but also disinfects.
Paris 1874 doesn’t reconstitute all of what’s known today as the first Impressionist salon, though it comes close. Rather, it clarifies and cleanses old thinking and situates the exhibition that unfolded at 35, Boulevard des Capucines, in a social, political, and, especially, an economic context. Good, old-fashioned, how-do-we-market-the-merde-out-of-these-dabs economics.
Art for art’s sake aside, nothing exists in a vacuum. What was this thing, the birth of Impressionism?
The first gallery presents a juxtaposition of old against new, bite-size and in a nutshell. Paris 1874 then challenges, surprises, and delights as the curators tease complexity from what seemed so easy. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, long touted as the first Impressionist picture, is there. It’s not really “the first.” We learn along the way that Impressionism wasn’t so much Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus as a sumptuous cassoulet, one that simmered not overnight but for years.
That said, Impression, Sunrise is famous, a beauty, and almost never leaves the Musée Marmottan in Paris, having been stolen in 1985 by Japanese gangsters and missing until it was found in Corsica five years later.
What’s old? The official Salon, that’s what. Next to Impression, Sunrise is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise, from 1873, a medal-winner at the 1874 Salon, which opened two weeks after the Société show. The annual Salon, and the affair started in the 1660s, was sponsored by the Académie des beaux-arts, France’s most prestigious art school, think tank, and honors society. It was a juried art show displaying what was seen as the pinnacle of taste in art, filtered by tradition. It was also, though it was unaware of this, the Western world’s preeminent art fair.
In 1874, about 3,700 works by nearly 2,000 artists were on view, packed floor to ceiling at the Palais de l’Industrie, the Gothic Revival pile built in 1855 for the Paris World Fair and thanks to Napoléon III’s effort to exceed the splendor of the Crystal Palace and London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Around 500,000 people attended.
Gérôme’s painting is emblematic. It’s a history painting. A hierarchy among genres still governed French establishment taste, with history painting on top and, in descending order, religious and landscape subjects, scenes of everyday life, and portraits. Mixed in the hierarchy were sculpture, highly regarded, drawings, near the bottom because they were seen as preparatory, and prints, nice but small and, since geared to individual, private contemplation, unable to convey the grandeur that was French culture. Gérôme’s painting is highly finished, each inch crisp, clear, and resolved, crafted with both élan and precision. We can imagine the artist’s intellect and skill but don’t want to see his gestures. That would be tacky.
L’Éminence Grise is an inspired choice, too, because of its subject, François Leclerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar and Cardinal Richelieu’s fixer and right-hand man. Richelieu was the power behind the throne of Louis XIII, so Tremblay possessed discrete, hidden power — much as the Salon’s jury did. It had overt power in selecting what was and wasn’t displayed, considered not only quality but politics and personalities, ruled with opacity, and rankled in its rejections. The jury’s selection process was rigged to favor older, successful artists, some also professors.
Also in the first gallery are Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, from 1873, displayed in the Société show, a sparkling, fleeting view of a crowded, upscale city street where, in the spacious, luxurious studio of the photographer known as Nadar, the Société show happened. It’s dappling and fresh and a glass hive. It’s peak Impressionism.
Near it is Camille-Léopold Cabaillot-Lasalle’s La Salon de 1874, a view of a gallery in the official exhibition. That’s a clever choice, too. It shows us the Salon’s display strategy, which is mind-blowing abundance, and its well-heeled visitorship, social, attentive, and refined, no jeans, and shirtlessness and bare feet “prohibé.” And no pet-eating illegals allowed.
Praise the Lord and all the saints, and let’s toss the seraphim, the cherubim, and the Four Living Creatures in the mix, too. Nowhere in Paris 1874 do we wade through puddles of tears over white supremacy, settler colonialism, or the prison-industrial complex. The exhibition is straight art history. What a tonic.
There’s real trauma on one score, though, and this helps us understand the Impressionist phenomenon. The Prussian invasion and the Commune — Paris was sacked by revolutionaries, chunks of the city burned, and thousands died — unfolded in 1870 and 1871. The Haussmann demolition and reimagining of Paris had just happened. Promethean bounce-back is part of the miracle that’s human nature, but, in Paris, the will to make something new rather than to rehash the old seems to have been a powerful part of Impressionism’s DNA and an impetus for the Société.
The année terrible cut multiple ways. Artists hoping to pay the bills, much less thrive, believed that the Commune endangered careers because, being a communist movement, it would destroy the bourgeois, art-buying public. Degas, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Henri Rouart, all Société exhibitors, were from affluent backgrounds, but Monet, Cézanne, Sisley, Pissarro, and Boudin couldn’t afford to be too nonconformist. Many of the Société artists had fled Paris during the war and subsequent upheaval. New, impromptu studios and new settings were a creative jolt. Napoleon III was out in 1870. The Third Republic was in.
Questioning authority had cachet, but unhappiness with the Salon wasn’t new. Some was natural. Reject an artist — and Degas was rejected many times — and a new belligerent is born. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe was notoriously nixed by the Salon. Starting in 1863, artists whose work the Salon jury had rejected held a Salon des Refusés. And by 1873, artists such as Degas, Renoir, and Monet, whose work showed a freer, outdoorsy, more spontaneous character, saw the Salon’s jury system as a road to nowhere. For them, the Société offered the freedom to exhibit, which meant the freedom to market. The Société show would give no awards, which the Société’s members felt were warped by art-world politics.
Paris 1874 celebrates the eccentricity of the Société show, and it also explains it. Renoir’s The Dancer, whose skirt is like a puffy cloud, Sisley’s and Pissarro’s luminous, breezy landscapes, Boudin’s pastel cloud studies, Degas’s ballet dancers, and Monet’s work are iconic. They’re impressions, through their quick-take look and free handling of paint. There’s no moral message, though voyeurs would be pleased. Berthe Morisot’s bourgeois women at leisure and views of the new Paris are there, too, as well as the technology of a modern age. With a palette of gray-blue, ochre, and rose, Sisley’s Seine at Port-Marly has to be the prettiest water-pump station on Earth. Mundane and exurban, it supplied the water to irrigate Versailles’s gardens.
Then there are the oddball artists and objects. Auguste Ottin’s marble bust of Ingres is far removed from the avant-garde, but he was famous and had agreed to be the Société’s treasurer. Édouard Brandon painted scenes of Jewish life. Degas, his buddy, twisted his arm, not for aesthetic reasons but to boost the Société’s paying shareholders. Ludovic Lepic was another Degas friend. He was rich and influential and had a fondness for dogs, whose portraits in the Société show have to be its most counterintuitive works.
The location of the Société show — Nadar’s studio — was much calculated and symbolic. The pioneer of Paris portrait photography, Nadar was modern to the core and then some. An amateur balloonist, he organized mail delivery by hot-air balloon during the Commune blockade, inventing airmail. Nadar’s space was free, the biggest point in its favor, but the movers and shakers among the Société — mostly Degas — thought the neighborhood was in sync with their mission and spirit. It was the heart of the new Paris.
Nearby were Garnier’s new opera house; Le Printemps, the fancy department store; boutiques; the House of Worth; and the Bourse, Paris’s commodities exchange, though it hadn’t been rebuilt yet. Nadar’s space had skylights with adjustable blinds, an elevator, an interior fountain for gentle gurgles, and, in case of a hot spell, air-conditioning.
The walls, to the artists’ delight, were smoky red fabric, the floors were carpeted in red abstract flowers against a black field. Blues and greens in landscapes popped like firecrackers. Red is the color of passion and a good color for evening events meant to enliven and engage rather than sedate. It’s a good dining-room color, especially if dinner is by candlelight. Set against a red wall, Renoir’s The Theater Box got an extra jolt of drama. Unlike the Salon, the Société show wasn’t packed and stacked. Art had room to breathe.
Paris 1874 smartly avoids a black-and-white contrast between the Société and Salon exhibitions and debunks a good-versus-evil approach to them. Both shows, we see, were an eclectic affair. Manet’s The Railway, from 1873, was in the Salon show and, now, it’s in Paris 1874. It’s a scene of modern life, dab-packed, luminous, bright, and less narrative than anecdotal and serendipitous. Gérôme’s L’Éminence Grise is didactic. Manet’s picture stars a sassy, multi-blue bow, a sleeping puppy, a bunch of grapes, an iron grate, and puffs of steam. It’s as Impressionist as it gets. Zacharie Astruc, with 14 works in the Société show, many watercolors, was, like Gérôme, an Orientalist.
There are 45 or so works of art in Paris 1874 that were in that year’s Salon. This is a lot, and the old-versus-new point could have been made with far fewer. Still, I can’t begrudge a place in the sun for Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, or Henri-Paul Motte, whose Trojan Horse was his Salon debut and a favorite of mine this week.
The first-rate catalogue is edited by Sylvie Patry from the Musée d’Orsay and Anne Robbins from the National Gallery. What’s becoming standard in museum catalogues now are lots of essayists — Paris 1874 has 15 — and short essays that are themselves either impressions and shallow or tangential tributes steered by the curators to their friends. Nothing of the sort here, since the essays, most a few pages, are still rich and satisfying, and, if the French practiced cronyism, at least the cronies delivered substance.
Anchor pictures such as Impression, Sunrise get an essay of their own. It’s too bad the National Gallery didn’t incorporate more of the gold nuggets in this essay into the gallery interpretation of Impression, Sunrise. The painting was placed in the introductory gallery, so it gets introductory messaging. In the book, we learn that the painting is a case study in Impressionism’s complexities and contradictions. Depicting Le Havre’s harbor, it’s lovely and quintessential, with wet-on-wet execution to make the colors blend, single, rapidly applied strokes, cool blue grays, passages of pink, streaks of yellow, and an orange-red sun. It’s morning in Le Havre, then one of France’s most polluted cities, so pretty it’ll kill you. Impressionism isn’t always parks, beaches, and gardens. An astrophysicist recently found, looking at the painting and weather records, that it was done on November 13, 1872. Many of the works by Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir in the Société show were done around the same time, so what was first is up for grabs.
Paris 1874 isn’t a miniature survey of Impressionism. It does, though, review basic themes and dedicates spaces to modern life in public spaces and at home, suburban leisure, and landscape. I loved the section on the Parisienne, the chic, sophisticated young Paris woman who has managed to remain an icon through every phase of modernity. She’s lively, frank, elegant, and sometimes she’s a courtesan, but who cares? Renoir’s Parisian Girl from the Société exhibition might look like a bit of a simp, but her blue hat, blue dress, and blue gloves make the picture more a color and a craze than a portrait of a person. Indigo-mania reigned supreme in 1874.
Paris 1874 isn’t a miniature survey of Impressionism. It does, though, review basic themes and dedicates spaces to modern life in public spaces and at home, suburban leisure, and landscape. I loved the section on the Parisienne, the chic, sophisticated young Paris woman who has managed to remain an icon through every phase of modernity. She’s lively, frank, elegant, and sometimes she’s a courtesan, but who cares? Renoir’s Parisian Girl from the Société exhibition might look like a bit of a simp, but her blue hat, blue dress, and blue gloves make the picture more a color and a craze than a portrait of a person. Indigo-mania reigned supreme in 1874.
By the by, the Société show attracted only 3,500 visitors, a decimal point of a fraction of what the Salon got. Only four works of art sold. By the end of 1874, the Société dissolved. Word of mouth, though, was good, and critics were more positive than negative.
Patry, one of the curators of Paris 1874, wrote a good essay on whether or not the 1877 renegade exhibition really started the movement we call Impressionism. Only 18 artists exhibited so it was more focused, the idiosyncratic artists from the 1874 Société show were gone, and the look was more coherent. Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro each displayed more than 20 paintings, so, for each artist, the show was a miniature solo survey.
In 1874, artists and critics were calling the style and technique of the intransigeants, the rebels — and, yes, the Impressionists — the new thing, for it wasn’t yet seen as a movement. In 1877, “Impressionism” entered French dictionaries. And Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was there. By then, each of the Impressionists was better known, more successful, and had committed collectors. The Salon still had a few more years to go but not many. In 1881, the French government stopped giving it money. By 1890, it was splitting into pieces. So was Impressionism, too, but the torch was passed."
www.nationalreview.com/2024/09/an-impressionism-150th-bir...
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"The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known."
— Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Notebooks, "Morals"
Image: ["No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information."] The HAL-9000 computer being interviewed in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
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“Il existe trois sortes d'intellects : le potentiel, le concret et l'acquis.” (Rabbi Na'hman de Breslev, Liqouté Moharan I, 25)
Oodles of poodles!
This was taken backstage at the Intellect Charity Ball as the poodles were all lined up to be tagged and bagged as raffle prizes. You can see the fear in their little fluffy faces…
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The Thomas Jefferson bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon, sculpted in Paris in 1789, is a marble masterpiece capturing Jefferson’s sharp intellect and character. Created shortly before Jefferson’s return to the United States to serve as Secretary of State, this work highlights Houdon’s talent for lifelike detail, showing Jefferson in contemporary attire with his head turned slightly. Jefferson admired Houdon as “perhaps the foremost artist in the world” and valued this neoclassical representation. The bust’s detailed provenance traces its journey from Jefferson’s era through French aristocratic collections to its eventual acquisition by the Museum of Fine Arts in 1934.
The Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870 and relocated to its current neoclassical building designed by architect Guy Lowell at 465 Huntington Avenue in 1909. The museum's vast collection spans over 500,000 works of art, with highlights including ancient Egyptian artifacts, 18th- and 19th-century American art, French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces, and a renowned collection of Asian art. Originally located in a Gothic Revival building in Copley Square, much of the museum’s early collection came from the Boston Athenaeum Art Gallery. Over the years, the museum expanded significantly, adding the Decorative Arts Wing in 1968, the Norman Jean Calderwood Garden Court and Terrace in 1997, and a modern Americas Wing in the mid-2000s designed by Foster and Partners.
Keith Bell
August 2, 1938 - November 20, 2025
The extended obituary below was penned by Keith and copied from the Beechwood Cemetery Website at: beechwoodottawa.ca/en/services/keith-bell
Keith was a northerner, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Northumberland, England. He attended the local village school in the small, coal-mining village of Delves Lane in County Durham, not too far away from the gritty, iron and steel town of Consett. After attending the local grammar school, Keith went on to the University of Leeds to study geology, obtained a B.Sc. and from there went to Oxford where he obtained a D.Phil. His time at Oxford, was among the happiest days of his life and there he made lifelong friends. A visiting Fulbright fellow at Oxford invited Keith to take up a post-doctoral position at the University of Texas in Austin where he spent three years. He always liked to comment on the differences between Oxford and Texas which were immense but at the same time interesting. During his stay in Austin, Keith made many visits to Mexico, and claimed that this was one of the most fascinating countries he had visited.
Later Keith spent two years in the Dept. of Physics at the University of Toronto in Canada and from there he went on to take up a permanent position at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he remained until he retired. He was an excellent teacher, and this came through with the students’ annual evaluations. During his university life Keith was active in academia. He was Director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, a joint research programme between Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. He was also a member of the University Senate, served on countless university and departmental committees, and was at one time president of the Faculty Club. He also was the first chair of the Grievance committee for the faculty union. Keith was appointed Distinguished Research Professor in 2004.
Keith travelled extensively during his career. After Oxford, but before Texas, Keith had a special grant from the British Government to collect samples from some unusual volcanoes in Uganda. Even after his retirement, he was still approached by researchers from different institutions for access to these samples. For most of his career Keith worked on a very unusual group of rocks called carbonatites. In 1989 he edited a book “Carbonatites – Genesis and Evolution” which became the standard work in the field. Later with a colleague J. Keller from the University of Freiburg he co-edited another volume on an unusual volcano Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania. Along with Tony Simonetti and Bruce Kjarsgaard he co-edited a volume of the Journal of Petrology dealing solely with carbonatites.
Keith always enjoyed working with others. Throughout his career he worked with Canadian colleagues of the Geological Survey of Canada, the Saskatchewan Geological Survey, the Ontario Geological Survey, the Newfoundland Dept. of Mines and Energy, and the New Brunswick Dept. of Mines.
Keith had an active research group of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at Carleton. With J. Blenkinsop, they set up the first multicollector mass spectrometer. He was invited as a visitor to Leningrad State University in 1991 and to Complutense University in Madrid in 1989. During his visit to Russia, Keith was one of the first non-Soviet geologists since the revolution to visit the Kola Peninsula, an out-of-bounds, militarily sensitive region in the Russian arctic. In his later years Keith carried out research in Italy, and along with Italian colleagues proposed a controversial model for volcanic activity. Throughout his career Keith reviewed papers for all of the international journals in his field, including Nature. Keith was always very proud of the fact that he co-authored eight papers in Nature. Keith’s collection of carbonatites was second to none. Samples were collected by him from Canada, Italy, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Hawaii, Finland, Ukraine, the USA and Russia.
In 1971, Keith married Irena Zajszlyj, and they spent 54 happy years together. Irena, of Ukrainian background, worked for many years at the National Library in Ottawa, and produced a Ukrainian radio programme in Ottawa for twenty years. Their quite different personalities complemented one another, and over the years they both did a great deal of travelling.
Throughout his life Keith, even as a small child, was a keen collector, if not stamps then old coins, if not old coins then antiques. Along with his wife, a collection was made over the years of art from young, contemporary Canadian artists. As a child Keith was considered to be a gifted artist, and throughout his scientific career he rented several studios where he continued drawing and painting. In later years he took up block print-making, and participated in several group shows at one of the major galleries in Ottawa. His one-man show of composers, conductors and musicians at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, he considered to be one of the highlights of his artistic endeavours.
In 2008 a session of the Goldschmidt Conference, one of the most prestigious conferences in his field, was held in his honour in Vancouver, Canada, and this led to a volume of Mineralogy and Petrology in 2010 dedicated to him entitled “Carbonatites, Alkaline Rocks and the Mantle: A Special Issue Dedicated to Keith Bell”. In the dedication of this volume one of his former students wrote “He was an excellent mentor and his drive for knowledge and research is relentless, stimulating and infectious”
During the last years of his life, Keith succumbed to an undiagnosed chronic pain condition that hampered his enjoyment of life and severely curtailed his interest in both art and science.
Keith is survived by his wife, Irena, his sister Helen Crozier, and his niece Emma and his nephew Richard along with their families. Keith’s passing on November 20 at The Ottawa Hospital, was sad for his wife, his family and all who knew him. It was hoped that his wonderful personality, outstanding intellect, vast knowledge in various fields would remain with us for more years. He was loved, admired and will be missed. On November 20th the world lost an outstanding person.
Family, close friends and colleagues are invited to say good bye at the Beechwood Funeral, Cemetery and Cremation Services (280 Beechwood Avenue, Ottawa) at 1 PM on Monday December 1 (and also via live stream), followed by an internment at 2 PM.
In addition, a full memorial celebration will take place in Spring 2026.
Donations in lieu of flowers to Diabetes Canada.
Artist | Thawan Duchanee ถวัลย์ ดัชนี (1939-2014)
Title | Despais Eclipse of Intellect กกุสันโธ (1968)
oil on canvas
200 x 238 cm
Exhibitor | The National Gallery, Bangkok
Exhibition | 200 Years Journey Through Thai Modern Art History
Thawan Duchanee, a legendary figure in Modern Thai Art, is widely known and admired. He captivated the public with his comprehensive artistic prowess, encompassing his artworks, eloquence, distinctive clothing. jewellery. collectables, house architecture, and self-designed furniture. His life and work intrigue both the art community and the general public.
After graduating from Silpakorn University. Thawan continued his art studies in the Netherlands from 1963 to 1969. The painting "Despais Eclipse of Intellect" was created in 1968, when Thawan began reinterpreting Buddhist themes. "Kakusantho" refers to the name of Kakusandha Buddha, the 22" Buddha in the Buddhist lineage according to Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana traditions. Before his ordination, Kakusandha Buddha had 30.000 concubines. In Theravada Buddhist art, the rooster symbolises Kakusandha Buddha.
Thawan did not adhere to traditional Buddhist art conventions despite its Buddhist origins. In "Kakusantho", he depicted Kakusandha Buddha as a giant two-headed rooster dominating the canvas. The head pecking downwards towards a nude woman represents Kakusantha Buddha before his ordination, while the head held high symbolises his enlightenment after renunciation. The two nude women in the background, one lying face down and the other face up, represent the desires and temptations manifested by the 30,000 concubines he had before renunciation. The clear, bright sky and the sun with a colourful halo signify the bliss of liberation, the happiness found in freedom from desire and suffering.
Thawan painted this oil piece on a canvas with a black base. He used a palette knife to apply lighter or brighter colours for the illuminated parts of the subjects, leaving the shadows and outlines as the black base canvas. This technique created scattered traces of black across the painting, adding a rough, textured surface that enhanced the painting's power. The palette knife technique produced flat, planar marks distinct from Thawan's many paintings created with brushes and pens, giving this piece a unique flavour.