Camille Pissarro | Les paysans / I contadini..

"Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing"

Camille Pissarro.

While the Impressionists are known for their depictions of city streets and country leisure, Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) covered his canvases with images of the day-to-day life of French peasants.

His greatest work joins his fascination with rural subject matter with the empirical study of nature under different conditions of light and atmosphere, deriving from intense study of French Realism.

Claude Monet | Venice painting, 1908

The canvases Monet* painted during his sole voyage to Venice*, in the fall of 1908, are among the most popular and the best known of his art works. However, their number is relatively small: 37 canvases featuring a dozen different views, taken within short distance of one another.

"Although I am enthusiastic about Venice, and though I've started a few canvases, I'm afraid I will only bring back beginnings that will be nothing else but souvenirs for me", Monet wrote to the art seller Gaston Bernheim on October 25.

According to Monet himself, the painter did only "trials and beginnings" in Venice. Although the canvases were finished afterwards in studio, they do not have the same impasto as other works Monet had struggled with, like the Rouen Cathedral series*.

Igor Talwinski (1907-1983) | Genre painter

Igor Talwinski painted portraits and genre🎨. He was born in 1907 in Varsovie, Poland and died in 1983 in Paris, France.

After the war ended, in 1945, Igor Talwinski moved to Paris, France.

He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1951, this was very successful and he soon became a member, without the usual procedures artists had to go through.

Irene Sheri Vishnevskaya, 1968 | Romantic Impressionist painter

The daughter of a bulgarian mother and french father, Irene Sheri Vishnevskaya🎨 was born in the Ukraine in 1968. Her art career began when Irene’s older brother, Vasily, was given a set of paints for his 9th birthday.

Told not to touch the paints, they became an obsession. Irene stole them, mixed them, and painted on paper, walls, her dress, and the bodies of her friends. She was 4 years old.

Alain Picard, 1974 | Figurative /Landscape painter

Alain J. Picard is an award-winning artist, instructor, author and speaker. His acclaimed pastel and oil paintings have been exhibited throughout the US, Europe, China and the UK.

Alain travels internationally as an art instructor, demonstrator, speaker and artistic advocate for the vulnerable.

Alain Picard earned a BA in illustration from Western CT State University and went on to study at the Art Student's League in New York City. Picard cites Sargent, Degas, and Sorolla among his artistic influences. A love of light and beauty are immediately apparent in his pastel and oil paintings.

Claude Monet | Failing sight

Monet's second wife, Alice, died in 1911, and his oldest son Jean, who had married Alice's daughter Blanche, Monet's particular favourite, died in 1914.

Their deaths left Monet depressed, as Blanche cared for him.

It was during this time that Monet began to develop the first signs of cataracts.

In 1913, Monet travelled to London to consult the German ophthalmologist Richard Liebreich.

He was prescribed new glasses and rejected cataract surgery for the right eye.

The next year, Monet, encouraged by Clemenceau, made plans to construct a new, large studio that he could use to create a "decorative cycle of paintings devoted to the water garden".

Claude Monet and Impressionism

When Durand-Ruel's previous support of Monet and his peers began to decline, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot exhibited their work independently; they did so under the name the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers for which Monet was a leading figure in its formation.

He was inspired by the style and subject matter of his slightly older contemporaries, Pissarro and Édouard Manet.

The group, whose title was chosen to avoid association with any style or movement, were unified in their independence from the Salon and rejection of the prevailing academicism.

Monet gained a reputation as the foremost landscape painter of the group.

Claude Monet | Legacy

Speaking of Monet's body of work, Wildenstein said that it is "so extensive that its very ambition and diversity challenges our understanding of its importance".

His paintings produced at Giverny and under the influence of cataracts have been said to create a link between Impressionism and twentieth-century art and modern abstract art, respectively.

His later works were a "major" inspiration to Objective abstraction.

Ellsworth Kelly, following a formative experience at Giverny, paid homage to Monet's works created there with Tableau Vert (1952).

Monet has been called an "intermediary" between tradition and modernism - his work has been examined in relation to postmodernism-and was an influence to Bazille, Sisley, Renoir and Pissarro.

Monet is now the most famous of the Impressionists; as a result of his contributions to the movement, he "exerted a huge influence on late 19th-century art".