The Impressionist painter had accelerated the pace of his work to match the pace of modern life. Monet was in search of the now, and capturing a short-lived motif required a spontaneous style. Monet himself described the challenge of making a laborious art serve the aim of “instantaneity.” Momentarily frustrated by the too-rapid changes of light as he painted his haystack series (October 1890), he wrote:
I’m grinding away, sticking to a series of different effects, but the sun sets so early at this time that I can’t go on.… I’m becoming so slow in working as to drive me to despair, but the more I go on, the more I see that I must work a lot to succeed in rendering what I am looking for: “Instantaneity,” especially the envelope, the same light spread everywhere, and more than ever I am disgusted by easy things that come without effort.
This kind of painting required its own kind of patience, to wait for the precise moment and come again and again in search of that moment. Monet’s friend Guy de Maupassant, who sometimes accompanied him in his search for that moment, compared Monet’s life to that of a trapper.
If the bohemian artist had to survive the rigors of hunger and unheated studios, the Impressionist had to brave wind and rain and snow. A journalist in 1868 at Honfleur, opposite Le Havre, described Monet in his neighborhood. “We have only seen him once. It was in the winter during several days of snow, when communications were virtually at a standstill. It was cold enough to split stones. We noticed a foot-warmer, then an easel, then a man, swathed in three coats, his hands in gloves, his face half-frozen. It was M. Monet, studying a snow effect.”
Of all painters’ works those of Monet are the hardest to describe in words, precisely because they had no “subject” but the momentary visual impression on a unique self. Though suspicious of all prescribed “forms,” Monet did create a spectacular new form of painting. In the “series” he found a way to incorporate time in the artist’s canvases by capturing a succession of elusive moments. Monet’s series were his way of making peace between the laborious painter and the instant impression of the eye. In his early years Monet had sometimes painted more than one picture of the same scene, and so revealed the changing light and atmosphere. But now he planned extensive series of the same subject under variant light, season, and atmosphere. Here was a new use of time and atmosphere, a new epic form, in which the differences between paintings were part of the plot. Monet had done something of this sort in his paintings of London in 1870. The series concept flourished and grew as Monet in his fifties finally put poverty behind him. Now a prosperous celebrity, he could elaborate his ideas at will, as repetitively and outrageously as he wished, with no worry of having to appeal to the market. Back in 1874 he had begun a surprising series of smoke and fog at the Gare St. Lazare, and had done paintings of the same fields of poppies. In the 1890s he threw himself into his series with passion and in profusion.
Monet’s first great series seemed to have a most unpromising subject. But for this haystack (meule) series the haystack was not really his subject. “For me,” he explained, “a landscape does not exist as a landscape, since its appearance changes at every moment; but it lives according to its surroundings, by the air and light, which constantly change.” In May 1891 he exhibited fifteen paintings of this haystack series, showing the same motif under varying conditions of atmosphere, sun and snow, sunrise and sunset. It was this series that had inspired Maupassant’s characterization and Monet’s own complaints of the painful elusiveness of “instantaneity.” Another series, “Poplars on the Epte” (1891), followed, depicting the variations of vertical shapes just as the haystacks pursued the rounded bulk of a haystack against the flat landscape.
Then, as if to show that even man’s works could nourish the most subtle impressions, Monet did a series of impressions of the façade of Rouen Cathedral seen from the window of a shop opposite. When twenty of the Rouen series were exhibited in the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1895, they sold for the high price of fifteen thousand francs each, a price Monet had insisted on. Monet’s friend Georges Clemenceau acclaimed the series as a “Révolution de Cathedrales”—a new way of seeing man’s material works, a hymn celebrating the cathedral as a mirror for the unfolding works of light in time. Here, he said, was a new kind of temporal event. Two more great series still remained on Monet’s agenda. A series on the Thames, begun in 1900, had produced more than a hundred canvases by 1904. Then, after Monet had settled down in Giverny in 1900, he began his water-garden series, which he was still elaborating at the time of his death in 1926.
It is difficult to grasp the grandeur of any of these series when we see only individual canvases in different museums. The delight of each haystack painting comes also from our view of its Impressionist companions. Monet’s fascination with the gardens at Giverny and his attention to their care were another witness to his obsession with visual change. His small home territory—Giverny, its paths, arbors, trees, and flowers and its Japanese bridge—provided inexhaustible motifs for Monet in his last years. He delighted in the daily opening and closing of pond-lily blossoms and in the moving clouds mirrored in the shifting surface of the ponds. In 1977 the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which he had spurned a century before, took possession of Giverny and made it a national Monet shrine. Clemenceau, as a politician less attracted by evanescence than was Monet, proposed that despite failing eyesight and depression at the loss of his wife, Alice, Monet should paint an encircling mural for a new studio. These dazzling murals became a monument to Monet, dedicated two years after his death, in the Orangerie of the Tuilleries and would be christened by some the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.
Still, no encircling mural could properly celebrate Monet the Impressionist. His achievement was not in the durable but in the elusive moment. He conquered time by capturing light, the speediest messenger of the senses. “I love you,” Clemenceau wrote to Monet, “because you are you, and because you taught me to understand light.”
55
The Power of Light: “The Pencil of Nature”
WITH photography, light did the artist’s work for him as it captured the instant moment, preserving the ephemeral image. The speediest force in nature became the artist’s ally in an age obsessed by speed. The art of photography would bear two birthmarks of the modern age, instantaneity and multiplicity. The speeding moment, diffused in countless copies, would democratize both the enjoying and the making of visual art. The best photographers would reach millions.
For creators of images this power to make exactly repeatable pictorial statements was as important as movable type and the printing press were for creators of literature. Woodblock prints, engraving, etching, and lithographing had offered epochal new opportunities to spread information, misinformation, and works of the imagination. But photography, which made every man his own artist, was democratic beyond the earliest dreams, as William Henry Fox Talbot explained in his Pencil of Nature (1844):
This is the first work ever published with photographic plates, that is to say, plates or pictures executed by Light alone, and not requiring for their formation any knowledge of drawing in the Operator.
They are obtained by merely holding a sheet of prepared paper for a few minutes (or sometimes only for a few seconds) before the object whose picture is wished for, using a lens or glass to throw the light upon the paper.…
It has been often said, and has passed into a proverb, that there is no Royal Road to Learning of any kind. However true this may be in other matters, the present work unquestionably demonstrates the existence of a royal road to drawing, presenting little or no difficulty. Ere long it will be in all probability frequented by members who, without ever having made a pencil sketch in their lives, will find themselves enabled to enter the field of competition with Artists of reputation, and perhaps not unfrequently to excel them in the truth and fidelity of their delineations, and even in their pictorial effect; since the photographic process when well executed gives effects of light and shade which have been compared to Rembrandt hi
mself.
When people began to believe that the photograph was the image of truth, epistemology, the science of knowledge, once the province of philosophers, would become a branch of technology. The truth that photography transformed would be revised again and again by cinematography and television, and technologies still unimagined. And these in turn would revise the standards of art.
Photography has a long and sluggish history—full of false starts, long hesitations, and failure to see the obvious. The word “camera” itself is a relic of the camera obscura, or dark room, which Leonardo da Vinci described in his notebooks as a darkened chamber where the real image of an object is received through a small opening and focused onto a facing surface. After the Italian physicist Giambattista della Porta (1538?–1615) described it in his Natural Magic (1568), the device was used by artists, draftsmen, and magicians. In 1727, the German chemist Johann Heinrich Schulze, experimenting with stencils of opaque paper on a flask containing chalk and silver nitrate, proved that light could darken the silver compound and produce images. But decades passed before this chemical discovery was applied to making pictures. Meanwhile makeshifts were gratifying the prospering urban middle class with portraits of themselves and their heroes. The physionotrace made a silhouette on transparent glass, which was then engraved with the subject’s features. The camera lucida projected an image on a plane surface to be traced by the artist.
Might it not be possible somehow, by focusing light on a sensitive chemical base, to create images and avoid the need for tracing? A motley cast joined the search. Thomas Wedgwood, son of the British potter who had been employing the camera obscura to sketch country houses for the decoration of Wedgwood plates, collaborated with the eminent chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829). Their “sun prints” used the effect of light on silver nitrate to copy paintings on glass. But they could find no way to make the images permanent. The ingenious French inventor Niepce, who had actually made a rudimentary internal combustion engine, turned to heliography. As early as 1816 he succeeded in fixing a camera image by chemical means. But the sunlight that darkened the silver compound produced an image that inverted the shades of nature. Niepce formed a partnership with the painter Daguerre, who was known for his illusionist dioramas of Edinburgh by moonlight and of Swiss villages. Daguerre improved Niepce’s technique into his “daguerreotypes,” images on thin plates of silver. Besides being expensive, these had the disadvantage that they were unique and could not be reproduced. Since long exposures were required while the subject remained immobile, the first daguerreotypes were mainly of buildings. But with more powerful lenses and more sensitive plates, daguerreotypes became popular for portraits. Daguerre had kept his technique secret, and some thought his invention was a hoax. A few even believed that to “plagiarize nature by optics” might be sacrilege.
But the eminent French experimenter in optics, François Arago (1786–1853), thought otherwise and headed a special commission of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. After working with Daguerre in secrecy for six months, they recommended that his techniques be purchased for the nation with a government annuity. Daguerre’s secrets would then be revealed. After Arago’s public demonstration on August 19, 1839, “a few days later, opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerreotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings.” In Europe popular interest soon abated when the difficulty of making good pictures was discovered and Daguerre himself returned to painting illusionist pictures.
Daguerre’s techniques remained popular in America. The versatile Samuel F. B. Morse of telegraphic fame, who was both a competent painter and an imaginative inventor, visited Daguerre in Paris and became an enthusiastic daguerreotypist. In September 1839, his wife and daughter cooperated by sitting for their portraits facing the bright sunlight for twenty minutes. Itinerant daguerreotypists like the hero of Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1851) and the prospering city daguerreotype studios have left us an unprecedented visual record of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. While people paid admission to see dioramas of Niagara Falls, fashionable portrait-daguerreotypists flourished in luxurious studios. And some of Mathew Brady’s memorable Civil War battlefield portraits were daguerreotypes.
Still, the daguerreotype could never have produced the revolution that would be accomplished by the photograph in the twentieth century. The long exposures made it impossible to take figures in motion or make candid pictures. Street scenes could be captured but not with moving traffic or pedestrians. In bright sunlight, an 1840 manual explained, a colored subject might require an exposure up to ten minutes in summer, and seventeen minutes in winter, while a subject in diffused sunlight required thirty minutes in summer, a full hour’s exposure in winter. Even after exposure times were shortened by improved lenses and more sensitive daguerreotype plates, a portrait in a studio required the subject to remain still for a full minute’s exposure. And each daguerreotype remained impossible to duplicate, except by tracing.
Meanwhile others were on the way to creating a graphic revolution. This would be a democratic revolution, after which images of experience could be made instantly by everybody, and could be diffused to the millions. The camera required no taste or skill, nor even discretion. This would be an age, not of picture making, but of picture taking. The power of light and an adept little machine made the gift. Now everybody could afford a family portrait. Reinforcing experience, photography abridged time perspectives, making visions of the recent past and the present more vivid, more universal, and more emphatic than ever before.
Three diverse personalities contributed the creative talents of the scientist, the inventor-industrialist, and the artist.
Of these William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was the most versatile but the least celebrated in history. From a wealthy and cultured family, he came to photography through his lack of artistic talent. While he had a subtle scientific imagination, his epochal contribution to photography was a bold thrust of common sense. From Harrow he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won distinction in both classics and mathematics. After the young aristocrat’s usual grand tour of the Continent, he established himself on the legend-laden family estate, Lacock Abbey, in Wiltshire, where he pursued his broadening scientific interests. He loved the works of Goethe and Byron, and named two of his daughters after characters in Scott’s novels. The ancient past tantalized him. He studied Hebrew and was inspired by Thomas Young and Jean François Champollion’s deciphering of hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s and the deciphering of the Assyrian cuneiform in the 1840s. While recognized as a brilliant Assyriologist for his translations from the ancient languages, at the same time he achieved distinction in mathematics, was elected to the Royal Society, and received the Society’s Royal Medal for his work on elliptic integrals. With an ambitious imagination he joined the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel and other great contemporaries in search of a unified dynamic view of all physical phenomena. And by pursuing the new wave-theory of light, problems of light-matter interaction, and the vibratory theory of molecular behavior in gases, he suggested a connection between spectral lines and chemical composition which opened the way to the spectroscope.
Independent of the work of Daguerre, Talbot came to photography quite casually and as an amateur. In December 1832, ten days after his election to the House of Commons under the new Reform Bill, he married Constance Mundy, of a solid country family, who brought him a dowry of six thousand pounds. She could not have suspected that her talented husband would give her the distinction of being the world’s first woman photographer. It was on their six-month delayed honeymoon that Talbot experienced his photographic epiphany:
One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusing myself on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with Wollaston’s Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take them: but with the smallest possible amount of success.…
I then thought o
f trying again a method which I had tried many years before. This method was, to take a Camera Obscura, and to throw the image of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of glass in the focus of the instrument. On this paper the objects are distinctly seen and can be traced on it with a pencil with some degree of accuracy, though not without much time and trouble.…
And this led me to reflect on the inimitable beauty of the picture of nature’s painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus—fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away.
It was during these thoughts that the idea occurred to me.… how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper!
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 74