12 minute read
Composition
COMPOSITION
PLACING
Figures
BRUCE YARDLEY reveals how the French Impressionist painters incorporated portraits and figures into their interior scenes and plein air landscapes
Drawing 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,
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
and, especially, Bernard Dunstan, a 20th-century English Impressionist much influenced by the first two names. (I should really add to this triumvirate Morisot, whose earliest paintings of women at their toilette actually predated Degas’, but I confess that at the time – the mid 1990s – I was only familiar with a few of her paintings.)
Dunstan’s constant model was his wife Diana Armfield, herself a distinguished painter [see Issue 432], and his informal – sometimes very informal – bedroom and bathroom portraits of her have a quiet tenderness. My wife Caroline sat for me in much the same way for several years. Sickert, who worked exclusively with professional models (or professionals of one kind or another), would not have approved; he thought it “good artistic hygiene” not to use one’s own circle for modelling duties.
Someone else might have envied Sickert his businesslike arrangements: it’s said that Monet was persuaded by Renoir to take up figure painting again after the years-long hiatus referred to earlier, but the plan was vetoed by Madame Monet when she found he had engaged a good-looking woman to sit for him.
Many cityscapes and interiors have figures in them in a subsidiary role: these sorts of scenes would in fact look rather unnatural without the human presence. Figures provide a sense of movement and, quite often, some useful accents of colour. It’s therefore important to develop a technique that allows you to render them convincingly but in a way that doesn’t distract. The challenge here is that the human form is so familiar to us that the slightest error in drawing and painting stands out. Problems of scale are magnified when figures are
Bruce Yardley, Sonia at Ston Easton, oil on canvas, 61x51cm “This was commissioned by a friend as a surprise birthday present for his wife, whose portrait it is. The surprise element meant I couldn’t have sittings in the normal way; I adapted photographic reference material that was sent to me.
“The unifying element is the low sun coming deep into the room, so much so that one doesn’t immediately notice how many different colours there are on view.”
present; so often, it seems, one comes across painted scenes populated by dwarves and giants. Impressionists such as Morisot, taking their lead from Édouard Manet, began placing identifiable people in their landscapes. This required them to paint those figures in some detail, with facial features and so on. I’d caution against such an approach, unless you are specifically painting a conversation piece or multiple portrait, for as soon as you apply features to a face the viewer’s eye will go straight to them, creating a potential source of distraction.
When the figures are small enough, a few deft strokes of the brush ought to suffice to make them recognisable as such: the viewer should know what those flicks of paint are meant to represent and will be able to supply the rest of the information themselves. Before the Impressionists, it would have been almost unthinkable to treat the human form in such a manner. The abbreviated way in which the figures were painted in Monet’s Fishing Boats Leaving Port, Le Havre, shown at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, drew derision from the sketch writer for [the satirical magazine] Le Charivari, who likened the black “licking” marks that were intended to depict people to the slapdash way in which granite is whitewashed to imitate marble. Actually, Monet’s black-dressed strollers don’t look to me to be at all roughly painted, but at this period any departure from the accepted Salon practice was bound to meet opposition.
A good general rule is to paint your figures in exactly the same way as the rest of the painting, again to ensure that they do not jump out at the viewer. If, as is usually the case, the figures are in motion, walking either towards or away from the viewer, you can suggest this movement economically by painting one leg shorter than the other, and perhaps using dry paint to create a broken, lost-andfound sort of line, which is less eye-catching than a solid, carefully painted one. This is more of a watercolour technique, but it works well in oil too. At all events, it helps, I think, to try to view the figure – the figure in its subsidiary, animating role, that is – as an abstract dab or assemblage of colour; if you start to think of it as a real person, you’re liable to become over-anxious about your depiction, and your painting might lose fluency. This is an edited extract from Bruce’s new Crowood Press book, Paint like the Impressionists. www.bruceyardley.co.uk
ABOVE Bruce Yardley, Morning Sun in the Bedroom, oil on canvas, 61x122cm “The other painter from the generation above mine who has most influenced me (besides, of course, my father) is Ken Howard. It was after seeing some of his paintings of the model in his sun-filled Cornish studio that I attempted this bedroom study. In order that the sun catches Caroline’s hair I’ve turned her head-to-foot on the bed, which I concede is a bit contrived. The main draw, though, is the sun glowing through the silk curtain.”
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