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# And it hardly looked like a novel at all | 0:00:08 | 0:00:10 | |
# And the city treats me, it treats me to you | 0:00:10 | 0:00:13 | |
# And a cup of coffee for you | 0:00:13 | 0:00:16 | |
# I should learn its language and speak it to you | 0:00:16 | 0:00:18 | |
# And 70 million should be in the know | 0:00:18 | 0:00:21 | |
# And 70 million don't go out at all | 0:00:21 | 0:00:23 | |
# And 70 million wouldn't walk this street | 0:00:23 | 0:00:26 | |
# And 70 million would run to a hole | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
# And 70 million would be wrong wrong wrong | 0:00:28 | 0:00:31 | |
# And 70 million never see it at all | 0:00:31 | 0:00:34 | |
# And 70 million haven't tasted snow. # | 0:00:34 | 0:00:37 | |
If I asked you what the Impressionists were best known for, | 0:00:50 | 0:00:55 | |
you'd probably say, "For painting outdoors." | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
And you'd be right. | 0:01:00 | 0:01:02 | |
Who doesn't love Monet's delightful fields of poppies, | 0:01:02 | 0:01:07 | |
with their unmissable smell of the summer? | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
Or those dreamy water lilies of his? | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
So delicate, so thoughtful. | 0:01:15 | 0:01:18 | |
Or his sunny moments by the river, | 0:01:21 | 0:01:24 | |
with their perfectly captured weather? | 0:01:24 | 0:01:28 | |
It's as if Monet's art | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
hasn't got a care in the world. | 0:01:36 | 0:01:38 | |
Everything in it is relaxed, sleepy... | 0:01:39 | 0:01:43 | |
..happy. | 0:01:45 | 0:01:46 | |
Renoir's the same. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:50 | |
All those gorgeous scenes of dancing... | 0:01:50 | 0:01:54 | |
..and lunching at Bougival. | 0:01:56 | 0:01:59 | |
Pretty girls flirting... | 0:02:01 | 0:02:03 | |
..and jumping on swings with the handsomest chap in the restaurant. | 0:02:06 | 0:02:10 | |
Pissarro's the same. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
Fields of golden corn, | 0:02:21 | 0:02:23 | |
sunny orchards, | 0:02:23 | 0:02:25 | |
happy peasants, merrily at work in the fields. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
Even when he paints the winter, he makes the cold look so welcoming. | 0:02:31 | 0:02:36 | |
All these famous Impressionist images will be very familiar to you. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:49 | |
You've seen them before on chocolate boxes | 0:02:49 | 0:02:51 | |
and the postcards people send you from Paris. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:54 | |
And even if you don't recognise the actual pictures, | 0:02:54 | 0:02:58 | |
you'll certainly know their mood. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:00 | |
That relaxed, optimistic, typical mood of Impressionism. | 0:03:00 | 0:03:05 | |
So naturally you're going to assume that achieving these pleasing moods was pleasant as well | 0:03:11 | 0:03:19 | |
and that the life of the Impressionists was relaxing and contented. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:23 | |
And that's where you'd be wrong. | 0:03:29 | 0:03:31 | |
Very wrong. Because the outdoor art of the Impressionists, | 0:03:31 | 0:03:36 | |
their most famous contribution to painting, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:40 | |
the stuff we all know and love... | 0:03:40 | 0:03:43 | |
..was a bitch to paint. | 0:03:44 | 0:03:47 | |
Achieving that pleasant sense of outdoor relaxation... | 0:03:47 | 0:03:51 | |
..was so much harder than it looks. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
In the last film, we saw the Impressionists come together | 0:04:02 | 0:04:06 | |
for their first show, in 1874. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:09 | |
Over the next decade they had seven more exhibitions. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:15 | |
That's eight shows in all, eight shows that changed art. | 0:04:15 | 0:04:22 | |
And from the beginning, they wanted to paint outdoors. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:28 | |
To paint what they could see, what was really there. | 0:04:28 | 0:04:32 | |
In Monet's case, that usually involved water. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:40 | |
Monet spent his entire life living next to water. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:47 | |
It was as if he was born with two umbilical cords, | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
one connected to his mother, the other connected to the Seine. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:55 | |
It started in Paris, where he was born in 1840, | 0:05:00 | 0:05:05 | |
and where the Seine is all twisty and urban. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:09 | |
In Le Havre, where he grew up, the river pours itself into the Atlantic | 0:05:13 | 0:05:19 | |
in a messy industrial puddle full of elusive glimmers and shimmers. | 0:05:19 | 0:05:25 | |
His final days, of course, | 0:05:28 | 0:05:31 | |
were spent here at Giverny by his famous lily pond, | 0:05:31 | 0:05:36 | |
which he created from scratch, | 0:05:36 | 0:05:37 | |
specifically to paint the water from every angle, | 0:05:37 | 0:05:42 | |
with every watery nuance. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:45 | |
So the whole of Monet's life was spent by the water, | 0:05:47 | 0:05:51 | |
and water was the main obsession of his art as well. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
This was just a bog when he got here. | 0:06:08 | 0:06:12 | |
All this had to be created. | 0:06:12 | 0:06:15 | |
But it was worth it because it brought him closer to this stuff. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:21 | |
The problem with painting water, the difficulty, the challenge, | 0:06:21 | 0:06:26 | |
is that it's constantly changing. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
Everything affects it. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
Every moment is different. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:33 | |
Water... | 0:06:34 | 0:06:35 | |
..is sort of there and sort of not there. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:40 | |
I mean, how do you paint... | 0:06:40 | 0:06:43 | |
that? | 0:06:43 | 0:06:44 | |
Monet's answer was to get right on top of it, as close as he could. | 0:06:49 | 0:06:54 | |
To live it, breathe it, all day long | 0:06:54 | 0:06:58 | |
in a special boat he had built for himself, a floating studio, | 0:06:58 | 0:07:03 | |
custom-made for exploring the river. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:06 | |
We know exactly what it looked like, because he was painted working on it | 0:07:08 | 0:07:12 | |
by his fellow boat lover, Edouard Manet. | 0:07:12 | 0:07:16 | |
Manet himself never became a proper Impressionist, | 0:07:16 | 0:07:20 | |
but he shared many of Monet's Impressionist ambitions, | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
as well as most of the consonants in his name. | 0:07:23 | 0:07:26 | |
Manet and Monet were always getting confused. | 0:07:26 | 0:07:31 | |
Manet shows Monet painting the Seine at Argenteuil, | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
just up the river from central Paris. | 0:07:36 | 0:07:40 | |
He's in his special boat, hard at work, | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
dressed from head to toe in impeccable white boating gear. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:49 | |
Not, you'd have thought, the most practical clothes to work in, | 0:07:52 | 0:07:56 | |
but Monet was a bit of a dandy. | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
He had all his shirts hand-made | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
and was famous for his frills and his cuffs. | 0:08:01 | 0:08:04 | |
Besides, on every French river, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:06 | |
the rowers were obliged to wear a different colour. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:10 | |
Here on the Seine, they had to wear white. | 0:08:10 | 0:08:13 | |
There's something of the Hercule Poirot about him, don't you think? | 0:08:15 | 0:08:19 | |
The neat little dandy dabbing away tidily at his view of the Seine. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:24 | |
And if you look at the back of the boat, in the cosy home-made cabin, | 0:08:27 | 0:08:31 | |
you'll find Monet's wife, Camille, | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
stored away neatly like a useful sack of provisions. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
Camille would sit placidly at the back of the boat, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:44 | |
singing for Monet, feeding him, organising his picnics. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:48 | |
I bet they had other kinds of fun as well | 0:08:48 | 0:08:51 | |
in that cosy-looking floating love-nest of theirs. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:55 | |
In his earlier years, when he was still trying to make it the official way, Monet painted Camille | 0:09:00 | 0:09:07 | |
in a gorgeous green dress and sent his portrait to the Salon, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:12 | |
where, not surprisingly, it was a big hit. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:15 | |
It's not a revolutionary image | 0:09:18 | 0:09:21 | |
or a painting that does anything very new. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:24 | |
But it does show how talented he was | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
and how much he liked clothes. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:30 | |
So does this other famous portrait of Camille, | 0:09:35 | 0:09:38 | |
in a blonde wig would you believe, done up as a Japanese geisha. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:43 | |
Is this really the same sack of provisions at the back of the boat? | 0:09:44 | 0:09:48 | |
Amazingly, yes, it is. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
Including your lovers in your art like this, painting your family, | 0:09:58 | 0:10:02 | |
your girlfriends, dressing them up, was new. | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
Michelangelo would never have done it, or Turner, | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
or any of the posh predecessors of the Impressionists. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:13 | |
But the Impressionists were trying to be true to life, | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
to paint things as they were, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
to make everyday life a suitable subject for art. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
Besides, when they started out, most of them were famously poor. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:28 | |
They couldn't afford other models. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:30 | |
Camille cost nothing | 0:10:33 | 0:10:35 | |
and for Monet, one of the attractions of the river, I suggest, | 0:10:35 | 0:10:39 | |
one of the chief reasons he kept coming back here | 0:10:39 | 0:10:43 | |
to watch the paddling and the people, | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
is that the river, too, was free. | 0:10:46 | 0:10:48 | |
TRAIN WHISTLES BLASTS | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
Mind you, boating across France | 0:11:08 | 0:11:10 | |
to reach all the landscapes they wanted to paint | 0:11:10 | 0:11:14 | |
would have taken the Impressionists many lifetimes, | 0:11:14 | 0:11:18 | |
and that's where the train comes in. | 0:11:18 | 0:11:20 | |
The French were actually very slow to take up train travel. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:32 | |
Water was more their thing. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
They'd just engineered themselves | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
the best canal system in the world, | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
connecting the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
the north of France to the south. | 0:11:42 | 0:11:44 | |
So when the train came along, all the water authorities | 0:11:44 | 0:11:50 | |
and everyone who'd put any money into canal building - | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
which was an awful lot of people - | 0:11:53 | 0:11:54 | |
felt almightily threatened | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
and wished the train would just go away. | 0:11:57 | 0:12:01 | |
In fact, until 1842, even building a train line in France was illegal. | 0:12:06 | 0:12:13 | |
In that year, though, the law was changed. | 0:12:13 | 0:12:16 | |
And the conquest of rural France by the iron horse could begin in earnest. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:21 | |
In 1842, there were no miles of national rail track in France. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:30 | |
By 1892, there were 30,000 miles of it, a crazy expansion | 0:12:30 | 0:12:36 | |
connecting Paris to its suburbs, the capital to the coast. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:40 | |
But it's no good just getting to places quickly. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:47 | |
You also need the right painting gear when you get there. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:51 | |
All sorts of gadgets were invented to make artistic travel easier. | 0:12:55 | 0:13:00 | |
The entire painting kit was rethought and miniaturised, | 0:13:00 | 0:13:05 | |
so it could all be carried around in this handy little box. | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
A few clicks of the latch and hey presto, | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
one minute you're this. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:14 | |
The next minute, you're this. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:16 | |
Now when you see pictures of the Impressionists in their full painting gear, | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
you might think they look a bit silly | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
and they're just trying to achieve a fashionable, painterly look. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:30 | |
But actually, all this has a purpose. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
The silly smock is obviously handy | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
for carrying your brushes and things, | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
but the really important thing about it, is its colour. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:45 | |
It's deliberately dark, black or blue. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
That's because if you're trying to catch | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
subtle nuances in the landscape, | 0:13:52 | 0:13:54 | |
the last thing you should be wearing is bright coloured clothes, | 0:13:54 | 0:13:58 | |
which would throw bright coloured reflections. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:01 | |
If this smock were pink, | 0:14:01 | 0:14:02 | |
it would throw pink reflections back on to the picture. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:06 | |
And these big hats they all wore and the twee parasols, | 0:14:10 | 0:14:14 | |
they weren't there just to keep the midday sun off your head. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:17 | |
More threatening to the committed Impressionist than sunstroke | 0:14:17 | 0:14:22 | |
was the damage done to your colour values by direct sunlight. | 0:14:22 | 0:14:27 | |
It just messed them all up. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:29 | |
If I paint something bright green in the hot sun | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
and then take it home afterwards, it'll look completely dark. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:50 | |
So the very worst time to paint an Impressionist picture | 0:14:50 | 0:14:56 | |
is on a hot and sunny afternoon. | 0:14:56 | 0:14:58 | |
That really is a challenge. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:00 | |
So the parasols and the wide brimmed hats | 0:15:04 | 0:15:07 | |
were to ensure that when you took | 0:15:07 | 0:15:08 | |
your Impressionist masterpiece home at the end of the day, | 0:15:08 | 0:15:13 | |
you could still see the glorious field of poppies | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
you'd spent all afternoon painting... | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
..or that sunny, boating view you'd worked on so sweatily | 0:15:21 | 0:15:25 | |
by the banks of the Seine. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:27 | |
Painting landscapes outdoors is hard enough, | 0:15:35 | 0:15:37 | |
but for really problematic outdoor painting | 0:15:37 | 0:15:42 | |
there's nothing quite as tricky as painting people. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:46 | |
Unlike landscapes, people need to be persuaded to sit for you. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:54 | |
They get bored, fidgety. | 0:15:54 | 0:15:56 | |
One day they turn up, the next day they don't. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:00 | |
You know what French girls are like! | 0:16:00 | 0:16:02 | |
Renoir had developed a fiendishly difficult ambition. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:09 | |
He wanted to capture the mood of modern Paris. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:14 | |
The bonhomie, the relaxation, the laughs. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
And he wanted to paint it all outdoors, as it was happening. | 0:16:18 | 0:16:24 | |
To do that, he got himself a studio up here in Montmartre | 0:16:24 | 0:16:29 | |
at the top of the hill. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:31 | |
In Montmartre, nobody watched what you were doing, | 0:16:31 | 0:16:34 | |
so you just did more of it. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:36 | |
This was where the poor people lived and where the most fun was had. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:46 | |
Away from the authorities, away from the old rules. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:51 | |
Renoir's new studio was along here in the Rue Cortot. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:03 | |
It had a handy garden... | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
..in which he persuaded some of Montmartre's | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
prettiest girls to pose for him. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:18 | |
Renoir needed to be at his most dangerously persuasive | 0:17:21 | 0:17:25 | |
to charm this 16-year-old Montmartre blonde, | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
Jeanne Margot, into his garden. | 0:17:28 | 0:17:32 | |
She was up for it. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:36 | |
But her mother, a wise old bird, wasn't. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:40 | |
Perhaps she knew that Renoir was deliberately trying | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
to update this risque old master, | 0:17:44 | 0:17:49 | |
The Swing by Fragonard, | 0:17:49 | 0:17:52 | |
painted in the naughty days before underwear was invented. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:57 | |
Renoir was stealing himself for something big, | 0:17:59 | 0:18:02 | |
a statement, an encapsulation of this new Parisian mood. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:07 | |
And this big picture was going to be painted outdoors, in situ, | 0:18:07 | 0:18:13 | |
with all the models around. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
So he ordered himself an extra large canvas | 0:18:18 | 0:18:21 | |
and every day for the whole of the summer | 0:18:21 | 0:18:24 | |
he lugged it around Montmartre with a pal. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
Down here. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
Along here. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:33 | |
Up here. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
And finally over here, to the infamous Moulin de la Galette. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:44 | |
The Moulin was Renoir's favourite playground. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:50 | |
It was everyone's favourite playground. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:53 | |
A bar, a restaurant, a dance floor, | 0:18:53 | 0:18:56 | |
it really came to life on Sunday afternoons | 0:18:56 | 0:18:59 | |
at the end of the working week, | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
when the flirting and the dancing reached its climax. | 0:19:01 | 0:19:05 | |
This is a galette, by the way. | 0:19:16 | 0:19:18 | |
It's a cheap and popular cake they sold in there. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
But people didn't come to the Moulin for the cakes. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
They came for the opportunities, the adventures, the joie de vivre, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:30 | |
and that's what Renoir set out to paint as well. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
He worked on it for months inside the Moulin, on the dance floor, | 0:19:36 | 0:19:42 | |
using the Montmartre girls and their friends as models. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:47 | |
Jeanne Margot's in there somewhere having fun. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:51 | |
So is her older sister, Estelle, the girl at the front. | 0:19:51 | 0:19:56 | |
Renoir's Moulin was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877, | 0:19:58 | 0:20:03 | |
where everybody noticed it. | 0:20:03 | 0:20:07 | |
It's a fabulous, fabulous picture. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:14 | |
But to see it only as a record of fun and frolics in Montmartre | 0:20:14 | 0:20:18 | |
would be a mistake. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:20 | |
The Moulin de la Galette | 0:20:21 | 0:20:23 | |
is also a big Impressionist statement, about social change. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:28 | |
The new heroes of Renoir's art | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
aren't priests or emperors or generals, | 0:20:34 | 0:20:37 | |
though there's probably a few of those in there somewhere, | 0:20:37 | 0:20:41 | |
everyone came to the Moulin. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:43 | |
But the real heroes here are the working girls | 0:20:43 | 0:20:46 | |
and the young chaps with attitude, | 0:20:46 | 0:20:49 | |
the modern Parisians in whose boisterous grasp | 0:20:49 | 0:20:54 | |
the future now lay. | 0:20:54 | 0:20:56 | |
Something else revolutionary about the Bal | 0:21:02 | 0:21:04 | |
at the Moulin de la Galette is the way it's painted. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
It's often true of Impressionist art. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:09 | |
The closer you get, the more revolutionary it seems. | 0:21:09 | 0:21:12 | |
All Renoir's art, all Monet's art, and Pissarro's, | 0:21:15 | 0:21:18 | |
is a tribute to the crucial contribution | 0:21:18 | 0:21:22 | |
to art history made by this fine animal here. | 0:21:22 | 0:21:27 | |
This excellent brush in waiting. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
Porky, the pig. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:32 | |
Brushes were the key to Impressionism. | 0:21:34 | 0:21:37 | |
Without the latest brushes applying the latest colours | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
in the latest ways, Impressionism couldn't have happened. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:44 | |
Traditionally brushes were made out of this little chappie here. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
Out of different members of the weasel family. | 0:21:50 | 0:21:54 | |
Various types of weasel hair were used, the most precious of which | 0:21:56 | 0:22:00 | |
came from the kolinsky sable, which lived in Siberia, | 0:22:00 | 0:22:04 | |
and to protect itself from the cold | 0:22:04 | 0:22:07 | |
the kolinsky had developed this special fur | 0:22:07 | 0:22:10 | |
that trapped the air bubbles. | 0:22:10 | 0:22:12 | |
And when it was used in artists' brushes, it kept the paint very well | 0:22:12 | 0:22:16 | |
and released it slowly, so artists who wanted to use glossy surfaces, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:21 | |
shiny surfaces, they used the sable. | 0:22:21 | 0:22:26 | |
In the 19th century, however, a crucial switchover occurred. | 0:22:27 | 0:22:32 | |
In techniques, ambitions and animals. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
Instead of smooth, silky, sable hair, | 0:22:36 | 0:22:39 | |
landscape artists began to use the hair from little piggy here. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:45 | |
Hog's hair was stiffer, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:47 | |
thicker and in the wrong hands, clumsier and messier. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:51 | |
But in the right hands, the hands of the Impressionists, | 0:22:51 | 0:22:55 | |
hog's hair made your brushes sing. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:59 | |
Hog's hair brushes didn't glide around the canvas, | 0:23:00 | 0:23:04 | |
they dug and scraped across it | 0:23:04 | 0:23:07 | |
in exciting furrows of paint and colour. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:11 | |
A new language is being invented and its ambition isn't to fool you | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
or pretend something is there that isn't, | 0:23:15 | 0:23:20 | |
its ambition is to speak to you, through paint. | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
And excite you. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:26 | |
So that's the superb contribution to progressive art | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
made by this fine creature here, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
the best friend the Impressionists ever had. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:40 | |
The River Seine is 776 kilometres long. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:54 | |
It flows all away from the Swiss Alps to the English Channel, | 0:23:54 | 0:23:58 | |
but as far as art is concerned | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
it only really gets interesting when it gets to Paris. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:05 | |
In Paris the Seine grows complex and devious, | 0:24:07 | 0:24:12 | |
twisting back on itself, toying with the geography. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:17 | |
By the time it comes out the other side, | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
it's become such a fascinating river. | 0:24:20 | 0:24:22 | |
Apparently the word Seine | 0:24:39 | 0:24:41 | |
comes from the ancient Celtic and actually means "sacred river". | 0:24:41 | 0:24:46 | |
The Impressionists certainly worshipped it. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
They kept painting it and repainting it, | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
until they'd made it the most painted river ever, anywhere. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
They saw it in all weathers. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
In summer and in winter. | 0:25:03 | 0:25:05 | |
In mysterious mists and terrifying floods. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
And the Seine was much too useful as a watery motorway | 0:25:17 | 0:25:21 | |
from Paris to the sea | 0:25:21 | 0:25:23 | |
to remain pretty for 776 kilometres. | 0:25:23 | 0:25:29 | |
Sometimes the new satanic mills cluttering its banks | 0:25:29 | 0:25:34 | |
coughed horrible things into the air | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
and filled the sky with darkness. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:40 | |
But most of the time it was delightful. | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
All these happy Parisians | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
enjoying their new leisure time in new outdoor ways. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:53 | |
Boating, sailing, having fun. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:56 | |
And one thing you can rely on in the story of Impressionism, | 0:25:57 | 0:26:01 | |
is where there's fun, there's Renoir. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:03 | |
In the old days in France, Sundays were for going to church, | 0:26:18 | 0:26:22 | |
for communing with your creator and feeling guilty. | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
But in these new secular Sundays that Renoir paints, | 0:26:25 | 0:26:29 | |
the weekends are for fun. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
And Sundays are now for relaxing and looking beautiful, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:41 | |
for parading in your finery, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:43 | |
for flirting, lunching and above all, for dancing. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:49 | |
Apparently Renoir was a fiend on the dance floor, | 0:26:51 | 0:26:55 | |
a really good mover, marvellous dancer, | 0:26:55 | 0:26:57 | |
and his love of polkas and waltzes is unmissable | 0:26:57 | 0:27:01 | |
in his favourite paintings of mine, Renoir's dance pictures. | 0:27:01 | 0:27:06 | |
Come on, how can anyone resist | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
these twirling evocations of couples having fun? | 0:27:10 | 0:27:14 | |
Renoir's joie de vivre is surely contagious. | 0:27:14 | 0:27:20 | |
The most ambitious of Renoir's dancing pictures, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:30 | |
The Dance at Bougival, features Suzanne Valadon, | 0:27:30 | 0:27:35 | |
an outrageously gorgeous Montmartre model, | 0:27:35 | 0:27:39 | |
who turned many a fine artistic mind to jelly. | 0:27:39 | 0:27:46 | |
Valadon pops up here and there in Renoir's art, | 0:27:47 | 0:27:51 | |
sometimes with her clothes on. | 0:27:51 | 0:27:54 | |
Often without them. | 0:27:55 | 0:27:57 | |
She's the modern girl as the new Venus, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
elbowing out the imaginary goddesses of the Greeks | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
and elbowing in the living, | 0:28:04 | 0:28:07 | |
breathing girls of Montmartre. | 0:28:07 | 0:28:11 | |
Even Renoir, who was hardly a prober of people's character... | 0:28:15 | 0:28:19 | |
..found something deep to notice in Suzanne Valadon. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:25 | |
He painted her dancing, here, at Bougival. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
Renoir saw something far away in Valadon's eyes, | 0:28:32 | 0:28:37 | |
a doubt, a dream, a regret. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:40 | |
As characterisation, it's not in the Rembrandt league, | 0:28:41 | 0:28:46 | |
but it is deeper than we usually expect of Renoir. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:50 | |
These sensuous pleasure pictures of Renoir's | 0:28:54 | 0:28:57 | |
painted on location outdoors | 0:28:57 | 0:28:59 | |
are deliberately blowing raspberries at the Old Masters. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
Their message is that the modern world | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
and the things modern people do are a fitting subject for great art. | 0:29:06 | 0:29:12 | |
Today, we tend to look down on Renoir's party paintings | 0:29:13 | 0:29:18 | |
and accuse them of superficiality. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:21 | |
As Renoir himself once complained, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
people don't take you seriously if you smile. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:29 | |
Bravo. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:32 | |
SCATTERED APPLAUSE | 0:29:32 | 0:29:34 | |
The world was opening up. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:42 | |
Places that had been so difficult to get to were now easy. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:49 | |
This place, Etretat, in Normandy, was just a train ride from Paris. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:57 | |
The difficulties here started after you arrived. | 0:29:59 | 0:30:03 | |
Monet knew Etretat from his youth. | 0:30:04 | 0:30:07 | |
He grew up in Le Havre, just up the coast from here, | 0:30:07 | 0:30:10 | |
and he was, of course, a beach bum by instinct. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
When Monet returned here a full-grown Impressionist, | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
he'd stay in a hotel just back from the beach. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
Sometimes he was content to paint the view from the hotel window. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:28 | |
But most times he wasn't. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
Painting in Etretat was anything but simple. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
In fact, it was damned difficult. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:39 | |
Monet would have to lug his gear | 0:30:41 | 0:30:45 | |
across all these treacherous boulders to get to the best rocks. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:51 | |
And then he'd have to clamber up there | 0:30:53 | 0:30:56 | |
to that spooky tunnel you can see... | 0:30:56 | 0:30:59 | |
..to his favourite beach on the other side. | 0:31:01 | 0:31:04 | |
These days, it's even tougher to get down there. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:13 | |
The sea's completely cut it off. | 0:31:13 | 0:31:16 | |
If he was in the money, he'd get some of the local kids to carry his gear for him, | 0:31:22 | 0:31:28 | |
so you have to imagine a procession of small children, overburdened | 0:31:28 | 0:31:32 | |
with canvases, easels, parasols, | 0:31:32 | 0:31:37 | |
slithering across the rocks to get to Monet's secret beach. | 0:31:37 | 0:31:41 | |
One day, he was so engrossed in painting the sea | 0:31:45 | 0:31:48 | |
that he lost track of time and forgot the tide. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:53 | |
As the tide rushed in, he was trapped out here on the rocks. | 0:31:55 | 0:31:59 | |
His paints scattered, his pants ripped, | 0:31:59 | 0:32:02 | |
his new canvases floating out into the Atlantic. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
He made it back, but only just. | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
These are some of the few original fishing boats left in Normandy. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:26 | |
Exactly like the ones Monet painted | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
and went out on when he was feeling particularly reckless. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:33 | |
The tide is high, so you can go all the way to those big rocks out there | 0:32:39 | 0:32:42 | |
and float right underneath them, | 0:32:42 | 0:32:44 | |
but you have to be pretty brave to do that and a bit stupid! | 0:32:44 | 0:32:48 | |
Another of the great Impressionists we'll be looking at in this film, | 0:32:56 | 0:33:00 | |
Cezanne, made a famous quip once about Monet. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:04 | |
"Monet," said Cezanne, "was just an eye. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:09 | |
"But what an eye." | 0:33:09 | 0:33:11 | |
Cezanne was trying to say that Monet was really good at looking, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
which he was. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:18 | |
Monet watched the sea more intensely than anyone else, but you don't come | 0:33:18 | 0:33:24 | |
all the way out here and float under that thing if all you are is an eye. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:29 | |
To do this, you need to have a big heart as well. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:33 | |
And a mighty set of cojones. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:37 | |
Dry land, though, isn't always a relaxing alternative - | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
not when nature decides to make it tough for you. | 0:34:09 | 0:34:14 | |
The Impressionists were very partial to snow. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:19 | |
They all painted it. | 0:34:19 | 0:34:21 | |
Monet, Renoir, Pissarro. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:24 | |
The snow picture became an Impressionist speciality. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:28 | |
Part of the attraction of course was the beauty of snow scenes. | 0:34:32 | 0:34:36 | |
Snow brings crispness and drama wherever it falls. | 0:34:36 | 0:34:42 | |
But there were also scientific issues to consider, | 0:34:47 | 0:34:50 | |
as there usually are with the Impressionists, | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
because the one thing you get more of in the snow | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
than in any other natural conditions, | 0:34:56 | 0:34:59 | |
is coloured shadows. | 0:34:59 | 0:35:02 | |
Look deeper into any Impressionist's snow scene | 0:35:05 | 0:35:09 | |
and you'll usually find some brave experimentation going on, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
with vivid blues and livid purples. | 0:35:12 | 0:35:17 | |
Scornful reviewers looking at these bright purple shadows | 0:35:26 | 0:35:31 | |
would sometimes burst out laughing | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
and accuse the Impressionists of hallucinating, | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
but of course they weren't. | 0:35:37 | 0:35:41 | |
They were just painting what they saw, | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
because snow shadows are never black. | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
They're always full of colour, and I'm going to show you why. | 0:35:47 | 0:35:53 | |
First, I have to build myself a projection screen. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:59 | |
Somewhere to show you the natural magic we're dealing with here. | 0:35:59 | 0:36:05 | |
The Impressionists did it on their canvases. | 0:36:05 | 0:36:09 | |
I'm going to do it... | 0:36:09 | 0:36:11 | |
..on this. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:13 | |
So that's my projection screen. | 0:36:16 | 0:36:20 | |
Now, these two torches are basically artificial versions | 0:36:20 | 0:36:25 | |
of the natural light you get around here in the winter. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:28 | |
This is the sun shining down from the sky. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
This one here, that's all the ambient light that you get | 0:36:32 | 0:36:36 | |
reflected up off the snow. | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
That's why the snow is so good for showing this, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:41 | |
because there's so much ambient light reflected off it. | 0:36:41 | 0:36:45 | |
So sunlight, snow light, but to show you how these two come together | 0:36:47 | 0:36:55 | |
to create coloured shadows, I need to switch off all the other lights. | 0:36:55 | 0:37:01 | |
That's better. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
Now, these are two typical Impressionist figures, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:10 | |
a man and a woman, bourgeois types of the kind you see strolling around | 0:37:10 | 0:37:16 | |
so much Impressionist art. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:20 | |
And I've also got | 0:37:21 | 0:37:23 | |
this coloured cellophane. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:25 | |
So think of this yellow cellophane | 0:37:29 | 0:37:33 | |
as an artificial version | 0:37:33 | 0:37:36 | |
of a sunny day. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
Imagine the sun up in the sky shining lots of yellow light down, | 0:37:39 | 0:37:44 | |
and if I throw this yellow light | 0:37:44 | 0:37:48 | |
at the Impressionist couple, | 0:37:48 | 0:37:52 | |
and also this other light, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:55 | |
representing the ambient light reflected from the snow, you'll see | 0:37:55 | 0:38:01 | |
that the Impressionist couple | 0:38:01 | 0:38:04 | |
are now casting purple shadows. | 0:38:04 | 0:38:08 | |
However, if I change the colours and make this a red light - | 0:38:11 | 0:38:14 | |
imagine a red sky with the sun shining at sunset, | 0:38:14 | 0:38:19 | |
and shine that at the Impressionist figures, | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
then you'll see that the colours of the shadows | 0:38:23 | 0:38:27 | |
change as well, and become greenish. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
It's basic optical science. | 0:38:32 | 0:38:35 | |
Light is made up of all the colours of the spectrum, | 0:38:35 | 0:38:38 | |
so if you block off some of these colours, | 0:38:38 | 0:38:40 | |
the receptors in your eyes begin to see new things. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:45 | |
Interestingly, though, the Impressionist era | 0:38:48 | 0:38:51 | |
wasn't just an important era for scientific experiment, | 0:38:51 | 0:38:56 | |
it was also an important era for shadow puppets. | 0:38:56 | 0:39:00 | |
Puppet shows were an immensely popular entertainment | 0:39:00 | 0:39:04 | |
in the bars and cabarets of Montmartre, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
and huge crowds would flock to see the best ones. | 0:39:07 | 0:39:11 | |
And any nosy Impressionist in the audience | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
couldn't have failed to notice the intriguing colour issues | 0:39:14 | 0:39:19 | |
that were being raised by these puppet shows. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
If we jump ahead in this series to the Seurat story that's coming up, | 0:39:27 | 0:39:33 | |
we'll see coloured shadows and the magic of the puppet show combined | 0:39:33 | 0:39:37 | |
so adventurously and brilliantly. | 0:39:37 | 0:39:41 | |
Bonjour, Madame. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:44 | |
Bonjour, Monsieur! | 0:39:44 | 0:39:45 | |
Vous etes tres belle! | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
Oooooh! | 0:39:48 | 0:39:51 | |
The Impressionist who was most fascinated by coloured shadows | 0:39:56 | 0:40:00 | |
was Camille Pissarro, | 0:40:00 | 0:40:02 | |
who loved Christmas scenes and winter frosts. | 0:40:02 | 0:40:07 | |
He found plenty of both here in Pontoise, where he moved in 1872. | 0:40:07 | 0:40:13 | |
Pissarro didn't just look like Father Christmas, | 0:40:15 | 0:40:19 | |
he behaved like him as well. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
One of his best qualities was his generosity. | 0:40:21 | 0:40:25 | |
Most French artists of the time had egos the size of the Eiffel Tower | 0:40:32 | 0:40:37 | |
and thought only of "moi, moi, moi". | 0:40:37 | 0:40:40 | |
But not Pissarro. | 0:40:40 | 0:40:43 | |
If you keep watching this series, | 0:40:43 | 0:40:45 | |
you'll see him helping Gauguin become an Impressionist, | 0:40:45 | 0:40:49 | |
and then promoting Seurat, the genius of the dots. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:53 | |
He even made sure poor old Van Gogh had somewhere peaceful to die, | 0:40:54 | 0:41:00 | |
by bringing him here, to Auvers, just up the river from Pontoise. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:06 | |
Back at the beginning of our story, | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
in the early days of Impressionism, Pissarro even took in an interest | 0:41:20 | 0:41:26 | |
in an artist that no-one else would touch with a barge pole. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:30 | |
A particularly stubborn and selfish and downright weird painter | 0:41:30 | 0:41:37 | |
called Cezanne. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
Cezanne's early work, | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
the pictures he showed in the first Impressionist exhibition, | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
are still challenging today. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
So imagine what people thought when they saw these things in 1874. | 0:41:54 | 0:41:59 | |
A peculiar self-portrait, | 0:42:02 | 0:42:05 | |
with a bearded Cezanne leching over a shivering nude | 0:42:05 | 0:42:09 | |
in a half-mad brothel scene. | 0:42:09 | 0:42:12 | |
A portrait of Cezanne's father painted with a palette knife, | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
and looking as if it's been carved out of tar. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:21 | |
Never before has anyone produced art | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
as deliberately dark and crude and tough | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
as these strange pictures. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:32 | |
Cezanne called these early works "couillarde", | 0:42:37 | 0:42:42 | |
which is not a word you find in most French dictionaries. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:47 | |
It seems to mean something like "ballsy". | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
An art made...down there. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
Rapes, mutilations, | 0:42:56 | 0:42:58 | |
big, hunking nudes. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:02 | |
The art pouring out of Cezanne when he fell in with the Impressionists | 0:43:02 | 0:43:07 | |
was so black and strange. | 0:43:07 | 0:43:10 | |
It was Pissarro who changed all that. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:24 | |
He invited Cezanne to Pontoise | 0:43:24 | 0:43:27 | |
and persuaded him to stop the darkness - | 0:43:27 | 0:43:31 | |
to get out of himself more, out of his black head, | 0:43:31 | 0:43:35 | |
and to start painting outdoors, | 0:43:35 | 0:43:39 | |
before the motif. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:41 | |
Somewhere just about here. | 0:43:41 | 0:43:43 | |
It was like throwing a switch. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
One moment, Cezanne is the creator of this. | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
The next, he's gone all sensitive and rural, | 0:43:55 | 0:43:59 | |
and he's painting this. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
When Cezanne became a landscape painter, | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
his darkness seemed suddenly to evaporate into sunny shimmers. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:11 | |
Cezanne showed in three Impressionist exhibitions | 0:44:24 | 0:44:27 | |
and then fell out with Pissarro, which was typical. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:32 | |
Cezanne fell out with everyone. | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
Returning home to Provence, | 0:44:36 | 0:44:39 | |
he cut himself off from the Paris art world | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
and devoted himself to painting the landscape he knew best. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:47 | |
This is the Cezanne family house, the Jas de Bouffan. | 0:44:49 | 0:44:53 | |
It appears in lots of paintings and hasn't really changed that much. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:57 | |
Cezanne's father was a rich banker. | 0:45:02 | 0:45:05 | |
The family home was big and bourgeois. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:10 | |
Cezanne enjoyed painting this posh pond here. | 0:45:12 | 0:45:16 | |
And when he finished with the grounds, | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
he started on the workforce. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:22 | |
In real life, everyone at the Jas de Bouffant | 0:45:24 | 0:45:27 | |
was constantly bickering and arguing. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:30 | |
But in the eternal game of cards | 0:45:31 | 0:45:34 | |
that Cezanne turns into one of his greatest subjects, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:38 | |
time stops still and peace takes over. | 0:45:38 | 0:45:42 | |
BIRDSONG | 0:45:47 | 0:45:48 | |
This is the studio Cezanne built for himself just outside Aix, | 0:45:55 | 0:45:59 | |
so he could paint out here in the countryside with no distractions. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:03 | |
It's been kept more or less as he left it. | 0:46:05 | 0:46:07 | |
Inside here, Cezanne produced some of the most revolutionary pictures | 0:46:14 | 0:46:19 | |
in the story of art, | 0:46:19 | 0:46:20 | |
using only the simplest ingredients. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:24 | |
All he needed was a bag of apples and a new way of looking. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:30 | |
The middle of the 19th century was THE great era of optical discovery. | 0:46:35 | 0:46:40 | |
All sorts of remarkable things were found out about vision. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:44 | |
What actually happens to the eyes when we see something? | 0:46:44 | 0:46:47 | |
What does looking actually involve? | 0:46:47 | 0:46:52 | |
It was an Englishman, Charles Wheatstone, | 0:46:53 | 0:46:56 | |
who first described stereo vision in 1838. | 0:46:56 | 0:47:00 | |
Until then, no-one had bothered to ask themselves | 0:47:02 | 0:47:05 | |
why human beings have two eyes. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:08 | |
Why don't we just have one big eye right here in the middle? | 0:47:10 | 0:47:15 | |
Wouldn't that be more practical? | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
More visually economical? | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
No, actually. | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
Because the reason we have two eyes is that with two eyes, | 0:47:22 | 0:47:25 | |
we can see in stereo and judge distances more exactly. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:31 | |
That's why people who lose an eye | 0:47:31 | 0:47:33 | |
have difficulty in the beginning driving. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:36 | |
They can't judge distances as well. | 0:47:36 | 0:47:38 | |
This had huge artistic implications. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:42 | |
Particularly for Cezanne. | 0:47:42 | 0:47:44 | |
If you stare hard at these apples I bought in the shop down the road, | 0:47:48 | 0:47:52 | |
you'll notice that each eye sees them differently. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:57 | |
The left eye sees them from over here. | 0:47:57 | 0:48:01 | |
The right eye from over here. | 0:48:01 | 0:48:03 | |
If I now combine these two views through the magic of television, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:09 | |
I'll get a crude Cezanne-ish blurring. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
An optical tipsiness that's so Cezanne. | 0:48:12 | 0:48:16 | |
Cos what Cezanne realised was that traditional, single-point perspective, | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
where everything is arranged in a line in front of you, was wrong. | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
What we actually do is see in stereo, through two eyes, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:33 | |
each of which sees things from slightly different angles. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:38 | |
The brain then combines these two images into a single view. | 0:48:40 | 0:48:45 | |
It's a momentous discovery. | 0:48:47 | 0:48:49 | |
Traditional perspective was under attack. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:54 | |
Outside Cezanne's studio, just up here, a short climb away, | 0:48:59 | 0:49:04 | |
he painted one of his famous views of the Mont Sainte-Victoire | 0:49:04 | 0:49:09 | |
and explored another fascinating optical phenomenon, | 0:49:09 | 0:49:14 | |
discovered by the under-rated Charles Wheatstone, | 0:49:14 | 0:49:18 | |
who invented this contraption here - | 0:49:18 | 0:49:21 | |
the pseudoscope. | 0:49:21 | 0:49:23 | |
What this thing does is swap around all your optical information | 0:49:26 | 0:49:31 | |
so what you usually see in your left eye is moved to the right eye | 0:49:31 | 0:49:37 | |
and vice-versa. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:39 | |
As a result of swapping your eyes around, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
concave shapes become convex and convex shapes become concave. | 0:49:43 | 0:49:50 | |
Everything is reversed. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:52 | |
Unfortunately, it's totally impossible for me to show you that. | 0:49:57 | 0:50:01 | |
There is no way I can feed separate information to both your eyes. | 0:50:01 | 0:50:05 | |
So what you have to imagine is that with one of these, | 0:50:07 | 0:50:10 | |
the human face becomes a mask, | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
which you see like that. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:16 | |
Backgrounds and foregrounds swap places. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:24 | |
The entire relationship of far to near is challenged. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:30 | |
A Cezanne also challenges it in his superb tussles | 0:50:30 | 0:50:34 | |
with the mountain that obsessed him. | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
The Mont Sainte-Victoire. | 0:50:37 | 0:50:40 | |
So did he actually use one of these? | 0:50:44 | 0:50:46 | |
I don't think so. He wasn't a man for gadgets. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:49 | |
But he'll definitely have known about it. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:52 | |
Optical discovery was in the air | 0:50:52 | 0:50:54 | |
and everything the Impressionists did was informed by it. | 0:50:54 | 0:50:57 | |
And if you stare at this landscape as intensely, | 0:50:57 | 0:51:01 | |
as relentlessly as Cezanne did sooner or later, | 0:51:01 | 0:51:06 | |
it'll start to shimmer and coalesce. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
Until it reveals its deeper truth. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:15 | |
This is the Pont de l'Europe. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:36 | |
Ugly as sin, I think you'll agree. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
But this was one of the most inspirational | 0:51:39 | 0:51:43 | |
art locations in Paris. | 0:51:43 | 0:51:45 | |
Great Impressionist things were done around here. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:48 | |
Manet, the grandfather of Impressionism, | 0:52:00 | 0:52:04 | |
had a studio up here on the Rue Saint-Petersbourg. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:07 | |
At number four, up on the first floor. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
Notice the window up there. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:15 | |
That pops up again in the smoky background | 0:52:16 | 0:52:19 | |
of a very curious Manet painting | 0:52:19 | 0:52:22 | |
set on the Pont de l'Europe. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
It shows a Parisian nanny with a little girl, | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
who looks out across the railway tracks | 0:52:27 | 0:52:31 | |
like a prisoner staring through the bars of a cage. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:34 | |
Remember, when Manet was living here, | 0:52:34 | 0:52:38 | |
all this was brand new. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
The entire area had just been dug up and laid out | 0:52:40 | 0:52:44 | |
by the infamous Baron Haussmann, rebuilder of Paris. | 0:52:44 | 0:52:48 | |
And the Gare Saint-Lazare down there, | 0:52:49 | 0:52:51 | |
at which the little girl in the picture is staring, | 0:52:51 | 0:52:53 | |
that was the first railway station in Paris. | 0:52:53 | 0:52:57 | |
And to emphasise the city's new connectivity | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
to the rest of the world, | 0:53:02 | 0:53:04 | |
Haussmann had given all the boulevards | 0:53:04 | 0:53:07 | |
radiating from the Pont de l'Europe | 0:53:07 | 0:53:09 | |
the names of European capitals. | 0:53:09 | 0:53:12 | |
London. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:17 | |
Madrid. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:20 | |
Constantinople. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:23 | |
Edinburgh. | 0:53:24 | 0:53:26 | |
Yes, Edinburgh. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:29 | |
Rome! | 0:53:31 | 0:53:32 | |
Saint Petersburg. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:36 | |
All these roads that lead out of Paris. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:39 | |
That's what the little prisoner in Manet's painting | 0:53:39 | 0:53:42 | |
is dreaming of as well. | 0:53:42 | 0:53:44 | |
The new freedom that she can't get to. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:48 | |
And neither can her nanny, | 0:53:51 | 0:53:53 | |
trapped sadly on the wrong side of the tracks. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
Who says Impressionism never had a message? | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
But the busiest Impressionist around here was Monet. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:09 | |
He was less interested in the Pont de l'Europe | 0:54:09 | 0:54:12 | |
and more interested in what was going on down there - | 0:54:12 | 0:54:16 | |
in that smoky hell of the Gare Saint-Lazare. | 0:54:16 | 0:54:19 | |
The Impressionists were frequent visitors to the Gare Saint-Lazare. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:26 | |
It was from here that trains left the city for the suburbs | 0:54:27 | 0:54:30 | |
and brought all those sunny views of the Seine within easy reach. | 0:54:30 | 0:54:35 | |
But in 1877, Monet had a Eureka moment. | 0:54:37 | 0:54:41 | |
Instead of painting the sunshine and the river banks, | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
why not paint the station itself? | 0:54:46 | 0:54:49 | |
The fog, the steam, the apocalyptic belching? | 0:54:49 | 0:54:53 | |
Now that would be modern. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:57 | |
Renoir told him he was mad. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:01 | |
Besides, he'd never get in. | 0:55:01 | 0:55:03 | |
Then, as now, you don't just waltz | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
into a mainline station and paint it. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:11 | |
There were rules to be followed. Forms to be filled in. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:15 | |
Jobsworths to be dealt with. | 0:55:15 | 0:55:17 | |
It should have taken months to organise. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:23 | |
Monet fixed it in a day. | 0:55:23 | 0:55:26 | |
Putting on his poshest clothes, | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
he demanded to see the director of the station | 0:55:28 | 0:55:31 | |
because he was Monet, the great painter. | 0:55:31 | 0:55:35 | |
The director had never heard of him before, of course. | 0:55:36 | 0:55:40 | |
His thing was trains, not art. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
But this posh chap turns up | 0:55:43 | 0:55:45 | |
and tells him he wants to close down the station, | 0:55:45 | 0:55:48 | |
to delay the train to Rouen and to fill the space with extra smoke. | 0:55:48 | 0:55:54 | |
The director is just about to tell him no | 0:55:54 | 0:55:57 | |
when Monet piped up, | 0:55:57 | 0:55:59 | |
"I went to see the director of the Gare du Nord the other day | 0:55:59 | 0:56:03 | |
"and he was very welcoming. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
"Do you know, I can't quite decide | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
"whether to do this at the Gare du Nord or here. | 0:56:07 | 0:56:11 | |
"What do you think, Monsieur le directeur?" | 0:56:11 | 0:56:14 | |
The next day, he was in. | 0:56:14 | 0:56:17 | |
It was actually very dangerous to fill the station | 0:56:19 | 0:56:22 | |
with all the smoke from all the engines of all the delayed trains. | 0:56:22 | 0:56:27 | |
But that was the effect Monet was after. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:31 | |
He'd set out to paint the foggiest sight he could imagine. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:35 | |
A vision that out-Turnered Turner. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:38 | |
A train shed full of smoke. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:42 | |
A dozen quickly painted canvases record his battle. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
They were unveiled at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 | 0:56:49 | 0:56:53 | |
and are among his most dramatic achievements. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
Man giving nature a good run for her money | 0:56:57 | 0:57:01 | |
in the production of clouds and fogs | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
and apocalyptic thunder. | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
Monet could have died painting his station pictures. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:13 | |
choking on carbon monoxide and smoke. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:16 | |
But he was an Impressionist | 0:57:16 | 0:57:18 | |
and Impressionists don't take shortcuts. | 0:57:18 | 0:57:22 | |
These guys were determined, hardcore, and did whatever it took. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:30 | |
Why they tramped through fields of the coldest cold, | 0:57:36 | 0:57:40 | |
just to capture the colour of shadows. | 0:57:40 | 0:57:45 | |
They trekked up mountains. | 0:57:52 | 0:57:54 | |
Wherever nature impressed them, | 0:58:00 | 0:58:03 | |
the Impressionists went after it and tried to capture it. | 0:58:03 | 0:58:07 | |
Fogs. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:17 | |
Floods. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:24 | |
Rain storms. | 0:58:30 | 0:58:32 | |
And treacherous coastal black spots. | 0:58:36 | 0:58:38 | |
They were after the truth and went where it took them. | 0:58:44 | 0:58:49 | |
And that's never been an easy journey. | 0:58:49 | 0:58:51 | |
Mind you, not all the exploring the Impressionists did | 0:58:55 | 0:58:59 | |
was done outdoors. | 0:58:59 | 0:59:00 | |
Sometimes the most interesting sights | 0:59:02 | 0:59:04 | |
are right there under your nose. | 0:59:04 | 0:59:06 | |
As we'll find out in the next film | 0:59:07 | 0:59:10 | |
when we investigate the Impressionists indoors. | 0:59:10 | 0:59:13 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:59:33 | 0:59:35 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:59:35 | 0:59:38 |