They suggest that this approach may have paid dividends in terms of art history, but misses the quality that made these pictures seem revolutionary, even shocking to their contemporaries. Both men argue that recent scholarship has been hung up on the intellectual and social context of the movement, its classical antecedents, its place in art history, and the startling fact that the subjects of these pictures are generally neither the traditional wealthy patrons, nor the attractively ragged peasants of genre painting, but a new class, the cheerful bourgeoisie. But MacGregor says there's much more to the show than a display of "icons of pleasure". Pleasure is a shocking justification for an exhibition in these days of pity and terror in art. "What has not been looked at before is the sheer pleasure of the swirl of paint," says MacGregor. Is it still possible to look beyond the Renoir umbrellas, the Manet Folies-Bergères beer mats and the Monet waterlily silk ties, and actually see the Impressionists? Is there anything new to be said about them, any intellectual justification for another exhibition beyond a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for a gallery overshadowed by the success of Tate Modern?Ībsolutely so, say the National Gallery's director Neil MacGregor and curator Rick Brettell, an American art scholar who has also written the exhibition catalogue. At the other end of the harbour, there is a panel of Rising Sun, painted probably only five years later, with all the details, boats, masts, cranes, huts, dissolved in calligraphic scribbles into the light. The front, in fact, charts the speed of the rise of the Impressionist movement: at one end, under the cliff at Sainte Addresse, there is a Monet from the early 1860s, flowingly painted but very traditionally conceived and composed. There are panels all along the sea front at Le Havre, a town so devastated by Allied bombing in the second world war that the tourist authorities now market it as "France's only 20th century town". Visitors to Caudebec-en-Caux, just downstream from Rouen, are invited to stand on the banks of the Seine, ignore the giant car transporters and petrol tankers blotting out the landscape, and turn instead to a panel reproducing Sisley's lyrical dazzle of light on the great wide stretch of still water. You can make pilgrimages following Light, River, Sea, Townscapes, Gardens and the Moment. A small fortune has just been spent creating six Impressionist art trails for tourists. The French tourist office knows it is on to a winner. The rest was art history and 1,000 miles of gifte shoppe tea towels. Among the 165 works was a painting by Monet called Impression, Rising Sun. The National Gallery's new exhibition Painting Quickly in France is dedicated to the movement that officially began with an exhibition organised in Paris in 1874 by a group of artists who went under the cumbersome name of the Anonymous Society of Artist Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, Etc. The real thing packs auction rooms to the gunwhales for the megastars, a Van Gogh bootlace or sunflower petal, say, an international frenzy breaks out. Over a century after they were first exhibited to hoots of laughter and howls of derision, the acres of dapply leaves and ripply waters, bosomy barmaids and paddling moppets are cherished by people who are never likely to buy a reproduction of a Rembrandt, a Delacroix or a Picasso, still less a Hirst or an Emin. The Impressionists are very big business, arguably the most genuinely mass popular movement in art history. Their long shadows now lie disastrously on the artists who jockey for easel space around the old harbour. Almost all the artists dubbed Impressionists (they never labelled themselves that way) came at some stage to stay at a farm on a hill just outside the town - where the landlady gave jugs of cider and long credit - painting sunlight dappling through the apple tree branches. Eugene Boudin, seen variously as the last precursor of Impressionism or the first of the pack, spent most of his long life in the town and painted every corner of it. It was in this town, almost 130 years ago, that Monet painted his gorgeous picture Towing of a Boat at Honfleur. "Oh dear," he sighed, gazing in dismay into the window of one of Honfleur's many private galleries. W andering around the galleries in the excruciatingly picturesque Normandy port of Honfleur, you could easily conclude that it would have been better for art if all the Impressionist painters had been tied up in a sack and drowned like kittens.Įven Michael Wilson, exhibitions officer at the National Gallery, seemed to agree - and he is about to unleash a pack of Monets, Cezannes, Sisleys and Renoirs on the British public.