COMPOSITION
COMPOSITION
PLACING
Figures BRUCE YARDLEY reveals how the French Impressionist painters incorporated portraits and figures into their interior scenes and plein air landscapes
D
rawing and painting the human figure was and is the central concern of academic art teaching, and the academically trained Impressionists never entirely abandoned it in their own painting careers – or never for long. Their early figure paintings, when their professional prospects were governed by their performance in the annual Salon, were understandably conventional. Claude Monet’s life-size portrait of his companion Camille Doncieux, The Green Dress, was greatly admired at the 1866 Salon: it had a reassuringly high level of finish, despite having been painted at great speed (in four days, by repute). When he attempted the same kind of subject in an outdoor setting, employing techniques that we would now label as Impressionist, the Salon jury rejected the submission. He continued to paint Camille, albeit on a smaller scale, until her early death in 1879, at which point the human form disappears completely from his work for several years. Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Berthe Morisot were all figure painters first and foremost, and unlike Monet, Renoir painted the human figure more, not less, in his later career. But these were hardly ever portraits in the full sense: indeed, I can’t think of any mainstream Impressionist for whom commissioned portraiture was important in a way it clearly was for, say, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent. Walter Sickert, like Degas, didn’t want his figure paintings to be “too definite” portraits; he wanted instead to capture an emotion suggested by a pose. In most of these paintings the figure itself is anonymous, representing a mood or action. This is the sphere in which an Impressionistic technique comes into its own, as distinct from one that is intended to catch a close likeness. It’s correspondingly more important, to the Impressionist, that the figure looks right in its setting, and that its tones and colours relate to those of its surroundings. When painting from the model in his studio,
76 Artists
& Illustrators
ABOVE Bruce Yardley, Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Paris, oil on board, 15x30cm “The smaller, lesser-known Arc de Triomphe of Paris is located next to the Louvre and thronged not by cars but by tourists. At this small scale it is feasible to render figures with just a few dabs of the brush, which should in turn communicate a sense of movement. If you paint your figures with too much care and definition, they’ll stiffen up on you. The viewer will know that those flicks of paint represent figures and will mentally supply the missing information in order to read them.”
for example, Ken Howard paints the background colours first, before painting the model, “partly”, he says, “because the subtle colours of the figure are affected by the more obvious surrounding colours”. A portraitist or figure painter working in a stable north light can afford to take such a methodical approach. If, like me, you work in a studio in which the sun comes in you can’t be so disciplined: you have to get things down on canvas quickly. My own figure paintings take as their inspiration the intimiste figure studies of Degas, Sickert
