PLACING Figures

BRUCE YARDLEY reveals how the French Impressionist painters incorporated portraits and figures into their interior scenes and plein air landscapes

- BRUCE YARDLEY

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.