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Reviewed by:
  • Impressionist Interiors
  • Clare A. P. Willsdon
Impressionist Interiors. Edited by Janet McLean. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 10 May-10 August 2008. Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008. 151 pp., ill.

We associate the Impressionists — apart from Degas — primarily with the 'out-of-doors'. Monet famously called his 'studio' nature itself. This catalogue, however, puts 'indoors' firmly in the picture too. Citing Mallarmé's 1876 comment that 'the chief part of modern existence is passed indoors', McLean notes how Haussmann's transformations made Paris a city of 'modern apartment living' (p. 12); the 'interior', in this sense, was contemporary life, the radical new theme adopted by the Impressionists. The exhibition that the catalogue accompanied naturally included some of Degas's works, as well as a lively sketch for Manet's famous Bar aux Folies-Bergère. Prominent too, however, were less familiar images, such as Monet's early Intérieur après diˆner, whose subtle simplicity speaks of the 'rediscovery' of Vermeer at the period; and Henri Gervex's smoke-filled Scène de café à Paris. Extending recent interest in international Impressionism, several non-French works were also shown, such as the Belgian Louis-Joseph Anthonissen's view of an ironing workshop at Trouville, with its sailors' garments hanging amidst a haze of steam and sunshine. The catalogue provides perceptive and informative entries for these and all the other works from the exhibition, together with two thought-provoking thematic essays. The first, 'Threshold Space' by Hollis Clayson, shows how Impressionist interiors were [End Page 409] typically permeable, even ambiguous, with windows, balconies, or doors linking outdoor and indoor worlds, so that Caillebotte's Jeune Homme à la fenêtre, for example, recalls Baudelaire's flâneur, who is 'in the city without being of it' (p. 21). Suzanne Singletary's essay on 'Men "At Home"' in turn reveals how the traditional gendering of private space as 'feminine' and public space as 'masculine' was frequently subverted in Impressionism. Edmond Duranty's 1876 defence of Impressionism, with its maxim that the empty apartment should reveal 'the character and habits of its occupant' (p. 12), is clearly relevant to these ideas, but an impressive range of wider literary and historical references is also cited. These show that 'interiority' — the expression of an inner state of mind — was as important in Impressionism as specific 'interiors'. Singletary, for example, relates Gauguin's Intérieur du peintre, Paris, rue Carcel, with its figures listening to music, not only to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, but also to Gautier's correlation of mood, figure, and object. Clayson notes how the 'complex circuitry of connection and separation' (p. 23) in Manet's Intérieur à Arcachon, with its contrasted male and female 'zones' and distant sea view, reflects the anxieties of his refuge from Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Because the essays concentrate mainly on the 1870s and 1880s, the years of the Impressionists' group exhibitions, it is left to the reader to make bridges from them to the later works in the Dublin exhibition, such as Bonnard's glowing Déjeuner and Vuillard's intimiste interiors. However, the catalogue overall provides a most insightful and welcome contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of Impressionism as an art concerned with meaning as well as with style, and will surely become a standard reference source.

Clare A. P. Willsdon
University of Glasgow
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