Impression Sunrise and the Boating Party the Essay

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Impression Sunrise and the Boating Party

The painting responsible for giving the Impressionist movement its name, Claude Monet's Impression Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant in the original French), is an important study of water and light, with water, sky, and silhouettes of ships providing the backdrop for the dark figures on a tiny boat in the foreground. A later Impressionistic work, Mary Cassatt's The Boating Party, focuses itself once again on a small boat in the water, but in this later case nearly twenty years of artistic development have resulted in distinct stylistic differences in the representation of color, light, water, and even people. Thus, while Monet's influence is clearly visible in Cassatt's work, the differences are what offer the most interesting place for comparison, because analyzing the formal and contextual properties of either image before comparing and contrasting the two will reveal some of the historical developments of the intervening years.

Before comparing the two paintings, it will be useful to first consider each individually. Impression Sunrise is, as the title suggests, an image of a sun rising, but the sun itself remains low in the sky and is not any brighter than the surrounding space, albeit it is distinct orange circle amidst the blue morning fog. The orange dot draws the viewer's eye to it before directing the gaze downward, first to the orange strokes representing the reflection of the sun on the surface of the water but then to the noticeably dark form of a small boat with what looks like at least two passengers making their way across the water. While the precise direction the boat is heading is unclear due to the indeterminate nature of the ripples in the water, a series of gradually disappearing rectangles of darker paint suggest that the boat is heading northeast, into the fog and away from the viewer, because these disappearing rectangles appear to be other small boats preceding the central-most one. However, one may just as easily interpret these rectangles in precisely the opposite way, as boats following the central-most one out of the fog, or else as representations of the central boat's passage through time, becoming indistinct as the previous moments fade from memory.

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Either way, the procession of small boats leads the viewers gaze across the reflections on the surface of the water and up, back into the fog, where the masts of much larger ships can be seen growing out of the border where water meets the sky (although the form of the actual ships remains indistinct). The strokes of the yellow sky curve to the left, giving the painting the impression of compaction on one side with a subsequent opening up on the other, such that the rightmost side of the image is composed of nearly horizontal strokes (giving added weight to the interpretation which imagines the small boat moving through time from the left background to the right foreground while the painting catches it precisely in the middle of its journey). The title itself reveals some of the contextual considerations one may include in an analysis of the painting; the fact that Monet chose to call it an "Impression" of a sunrise reveals the fundamentally novel elements of Monet's style, because this painting marks a distinct shift from earlier modes of representation which favored more literal (though no less subjective) representations of reality. In turn, this proposes to the viewer the possibility of a far more interpretive reception of the work, because it suggests that the meaning of the lies not in the precision of the scene represented but in the emotional impression caused by the image as a whole. Ultimately, this contextual consideration helps to….....

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