Impressions of Light' yields impressive French landscape paintings

Boston can be a pretty dismal place in the winter: the cold, the rain, the snow and the seemingly endless grey skies. However, from now until Apr. 13, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts offers a perfectly timed special exhibition, Impressions of Light: The French Landscape from Corot to Monet. The lush world of nineteenth century French landscape painting, located just a T ride away, makes for an excellent escape from the dreary Boston winter.

The more than 150 works in Impression of Light are comprised wholly from works from the MFA's well-respected collection. The exhibit strives to make the genre of French landscape its star rather than any one specific artist. It is a true treat of an exhibit, not only for the works which it exhibits, but also for the idea behind it. The exhibit creates a coherent, if not selective, chronology, through which the progression of French landscape painting may be experienced.

French landscape painting is a truly unique genre, which was thrust into the forefront by the Realists and their Barbizon School. In this exhibit, the impact of the work of the Barbizons is initially emphasized by presenting it in contrast to the work of Valenciennes, a French painter whose works reinforced classical idealism in both setting and composition and, subsequently, underscored the long-adhered-to hierarchy of genres. According to this hierarchy, pure landscape (or one where the landscape is the painting's subject) was ranked as the least important of subjects for serious painting.

This notion was aggressively dismissed by the first painter of mention in the exhibit's secondary title: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. One of Corot's most significant paintings, in which he aggressively challenged these traditional conventions, is his Forest of Fontainebleau (1846), prominently displayed in one of the exhibit's first rooms. In this painting, Corot exemplifies the essence of Realist landscape values: the non-idealized landscape is heralded as the true subject of this painting.

Led initially by Corot, and also exemplified by exhibited masters Theodore Rousseau, Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet, these realism-driven painters -- often categorized as the Barbizon school -- sought a new collective identity as artists outside of the mainstream. The works of these Barbizon artists are well showcased in Impressions of Light, allowing the full impact of their contribution to the French landscape to be felt.

Jean-Francois Millet, the major proponent of French realism, is especially well represented in this exhibit. From his preparatory sketches, to prints, to full-size paintings, the MFA's notable collection of Millet's work shines. All of the selections in this exhibit aptly embody the vitality of Millet's work, who was the first to seriously catalogue the life of the rural worker and his environment.

Also worth mentioning is the choice of the curators to include photographic renditions of landscape, photography being a burgeoning new art form in the mid-eighteenth century and one which had a serious impact on landscape painting. The invention of photography eliminated the need for painters to create "tourist" art -- art documenting foreign locales -- since photography could now more easily and accurately document.

The transition from realism to Impressionism was most notably shown in the early works of Edgar Degas and Claude Monet. The exhibited works of Degas focus on horse races and the people who attend them; Degas' work fuses the compositional merits of both landscape and figures to yield work that underscores an emphasis on spontaneity and modernity. Degas' pictures strive to depict that which is occurring now and depicting the "now" as it realistically appears, which provides a natural bridge between the works of the Realists and the works of the Impressionists.

The Impressionist portion of the exhibit concentrates predominately on the work of Claude Monet, however, several notable juxtapositions are presented between the work of Monet and the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The exhibit's curators make a strong statement in both their choice of displayed works and the manner in which they are displayed, underscoring the shift in Impressionist painting from the depiction of pure landscape to the depiction of light and the way it interacts with its environment.

The latter part of the exhibit also goes beyond Impressionist landscape, giving its viewers hints of the "what's next" of post- Impressionism. With works by Paul Cezanne, Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh all on display, an adequate view of the future of the French landscape is depicted.

The exhibition's end displays two of the most famous works from Monet's paintings of water lilies from his garden at Giverny. The two paintings of the water lilies, hung side-by-side, make a subtle but powerful mark to the exhibit's end. The water lilies embody the essence of Impressionistic landscape painting and underscore both the contrasts in ideals between Realism and Impressionism, while simultaneously noting the two movements' similarities.

While the Impressionists focused on the interplay between color and light above representative honesty and the Realists strove to document their surroundings exactly as they saw them, both movements believed in the importance of the depiction of one's environment as a worthy subject of serious painting and challenged pre-existing artistic conventions in the pursuit of their art.

Most significantly, perhaps, is that both movements embodied the philosophy expressed by the fictionalized van Gogh in Kurosawa's film Dreams. Upon encountering a van Gogh painting besides a river, van Gogh turns to Kurosawa and asks him, "How can you not be painting? To me this scene is beyond belief." Surely this is the attitude tactfully displayed in Impressions of Light, the passion and necessity of the artist to create a representation of the world surrounding him.

The MFA is open 7 days a week. Tickets for Impressions of Light are $18 dollars for students. For more information, reference the MFA's website: www.mfa.org.