(Thoughts on the emergence of Impressionism)


In 1826, Joseph Nicephore Niepce used a mixture of silver and chalk to take the first sustained photo.
In 1838, Louis Daguerre took a picture of a man having his shoes shined by a boy on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.
This photograph was taken by Daguerre using daguerreotype, one of the first photography techniques that requires painstaking processing of a silver-plated plate to form an image on it.
To achieve such an image (this was one of his first attempts), Daguerre opened a chemically treated metal plate for 10 minutes.
The artistic intuition of the painters told them that the worst enemy of their art was born. They perfectly remembered the sad fate of entire generations of scribes, scribes and scribes, which befell them as a result of the invention of printing by Johann Guttenberg in the 16th century.
Artists, especially young ones, began to feverishly search for an answer to this challenge.
The task was:
It is faster to learn painting without wasting time on learning skills (as it was in the days of classical painting – Renaissance, Baroque).
Painting is faster, “competing” with the daguerreotype.
To bring the painting out of the studio into the fresh air, “into nature”, under the sunlight.
Let’s note with some cynicism that they imitated their competitors in this way. Early photographs needed good lighting, and powerful artificial light sources had not yet been invented. Magnesium flares and electric lamps appeared much later.
Since the photograph copied the image of the subject down to the smallest detail, the artists countered it with some “vagueness” of the image.
And, of course, the most important thing: In any painting, the Artist’s personality, his handwriting, his character, his preferences, likes and dislikes, his weakness and his strength are present in one form or another. What is revealed in the photo is weaker.
This is my purely unprofessional opinion about the causes of the birth of Impressionism.

18 VI 2012