What was it while gazing at the Seine that Verlaine came upon his definition of water,”that impure liquid, a drop of which is enough to spoil the transparency of absinthe.” ?
Henri Cartier Bresson, 1956. click image for source…
What was it about the Seine that attracted so many great painters to the river? Monet, Renoir, Manet, Sisley and Pissarro among others. First there was pleasure and inspiration in the gay life of the Seine. “I was perpetually at Fournaise’s,” recalled Renoir, “there I found as many splendid girls to paint as I wanted. One wasn’t reduced as today to follow a little model in the street for an hour, only to be called a dirty old man in the end.”
—click image for source…
But the Seine had more to offer them: impressionism. For some years they had been trying to break out of the closed forms and the dark compartmentalized colors prevailing around 1860. It was the Seine that urnished them the instruments: light and water. Under their twofold assault, forms were broken up into a myriad of brilliant reflections loosened by the tremendous atmosphere that reverberated across fluid surfaces. Stable facts gave way to fleeting “impressions.”
—FRANCE. Ile-de-France. Val-de-Marne. Ivry-sur-Seine. 1956.—click image for source…
But it should not be inferred that the impressionists were the first artists to discover the Seine. Other had worked on her banks before, and her lesson had permeated their work, though not as overtly: Corot, Poussin, and lter Boudin painted the delicate, fluid oils and watercolors that made them impressionism’s precursors. Any analysis of the mainstream French culture today must lead to the conclusion that its behavior parallels that of the Seine. The Seine runs through 500 miles of French countryside and twenty centuries of French history and civilization.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson – La Seine
FRANCE. Paris. Ile de la Cité. Square of the Vert Galant and Pont-Neuf. 1951.—click image for source…
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