Monet and the Birth of Impressionism (Part 2)

When Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was displayed at the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 it inspired one critic to scornfully describe the artists on show as ‘Impressionists’. And so the name of one of the most successful movements in the history of art was born. But was the success of the First Impressionist Exhibition more fiction than fact? Was it really a groundbreaking moment in art history or just a chance for some impoverished young artists to make a bit of cash? Join James and Alastair to find out. If you want to see the artworks discussed in this episode you can switch on video in your podcast app at any time. Artworks in this week’s episode include: Edgar Degas, At the Races in the Countryside, 1869, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, The Courtauld Gallery, London Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris To see images of the artworks in this episode go to heni.com/storiesofart or visit the Heni Talks Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/@HENITalks Hosts: Alastair Sooke and Dr James Fox Additional Research: Catherine Ingram Producer and Editor: Ben Harding Executive Producer: Emma Cahusac Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction and Recap of Part 1 00:00:44 Walking down the Boulevard des Capucines 00:04:27 Inside the Exhibition Space 00:07:37 A Diverse and Eclectic Show 00:10:21 Degas: At the Races in the Countryside 00:13:29 Renoir: The Theatre Box (La Loge) 00:18:09 Monet: Impression Sunrise - The Painting 00:23:33 The Science Behind the Sun 00:28:21 What Makes It Impressionist? 00:31:43 Critical Reception and the Birth of a Name 00:43:38 Financial Failure and Dissolution 00:45:23 Legacy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome to Stories of Art. I'm Alastair Sook.

• 0:04James Fox?

  And I'm James Fox.

• 0:07Alastair Sooke?

  So this is the second episode in our exploration of the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. James, where did we get to in the last episode?

• 0:16James Fox?

  Well, Alastair, we described how in the 1860s and 70s, the French art world was dominated by this very traditional exhibition called the Salon, and how a disgruntled gang of artists led by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas decided to organise their own independent exhibition in the spring of 1874. And in this episode, we're going to talk about how that exhibition actually went.

• 0:50James Fox?

  We're strolling down the Boulevard des Caprices, one of the grand boulevards in Paris created by Baron Haussmann, about to visit a show that has gone down in art historical lore. But before we get there, Alastair, I think it's important to just say something about the date. It's the 15th of April, which is two weeks before the Salon itself opens.

• 1:15Alastair Sooke?

  And fascinatingly, there is this overlap between the beginning of the Salon and the end of the first Impressionist exhibition. And there are even artists who are showing works in both, which again complicates that narrative that Salon, bad, fusty, conservative; Impressionist exhibition, good and radical and exciting.

• 1:34Alastair Sooke?

  But the Impressionists, as they would come to be known, have chosen this moment because this is the time when all of the journalists and critics are doing the rounds and covering the so-called little salons. So there's been this gradual emergence of very small-scale shows that might appear around Paris. And it's the moment when editors are interested in commissioning art pieces. If you opened at the moment of the opening of the Salon, forget it. There's absolutely no point whatsoever. But this way, it's the moment where people want to think about art and maybe they're going to get some of the coverage they hope that they will.

• 2:10James Fox?

  It's for the benefit of people like you, of our critics.

• 2:12Alastair Sooke?

  I'm horribly looking at this through that prism.

• 2:15James Fox?

  I imagine that it's the same nowadays. I imagine there are part times of the year when the big exhibitions generally open and you are completely inundated with work and no small show is going to get a look in.

• 2:27Alastair Sooke?

  Absolutely right. And the thing that I find baffling is smaller institutions still sometimes insist on opening their shows at those moments. And you think this is such a shame. All this good stuff's happening, often outside London, which we're finding it very hard to cover. But yes, to go back, we are on the boulevard.

• 2:42James Fox?

  Yes.

• 2:43Alastair Sooke?

  And we possibly just had a rather fine lunch at a restaurant just around the corner called Hills London Restaurant. And we decide we want to go and see what this new venture that we've heard about is all about. Where a bunch of artists, some of whom we think we've heard rumours of, might be part of the so-called new school of painting, but others who perhaps aren't, are showing together independently in a big building in the former studio of the famous French photographer Nadar. So we walk along after lunch and we can see outside the building, there is a green tent or a canvas, some sort of canopy. And beneath this, there's a turnstile where we pay, I think it's one franc to get to get inside the show.

• 3:26James Fox?

  I find this turnstile thing particularly, this tickles me, the turnstile. Because it's almost like a cup final day. How many people were they expecting to turn up to the show where they needed a turnstile? But I guess, is it a way of identifying themselves as modern and as different?

• 3:41Alastair Sooke?

  I think, isn't it the way that people actually entered the so-called world fairs that were happening? And I guess it is another signal of modernity in that sense. I don't know whether the salon had a turnstile.

• 3:55James Fox?

  No, I don't think so.

• 3:56Alastair Sooke?

  We must invite listeners who really know about the entrances and exits of the salon to get in touch. But perhaps it was a way of differentiating themselves, it's true. Perhaps it's simply just an easy way of collecting the cash because they don't have loads of staff.

• 4:09James Fox?

  Or it's shaped by some kind of unfounded optimism on the numbers who are gonna, the hordes who are gonna pour into this exhibition.

• 4:17Alastair Sooke?

  Well, that is, I mean, we'll come on to how the exhibition fares financially in terms of sales. But clearly there is a sense of optimism.

• 4:26Alastair Sooke?

  You pass through the turnstile.

• 4:27James Fox?

  Yes.

• 4:28Alastair Sooke?

  And you take a lift, a lift that has been installed by our dear friend Nadar when it was his studio. And you're whisked up several floors. You will have seen on the second floor, I think, a bunch of tricolour, the French flag, which are there. Again, it's one of the details you always read about. I never quite get what the significance of that is. Is it sort of saying nationalist sentiment? It's not that they are these great radical. You mentioned in the previous episode, Pissaro is an anarchist, but these are people who are, they believe in France and the French National Project don't scare the horses.

• 5:03James Fox?

  Yeah, I think so. I think we have to remember what I said in the previous episode, that France was emerging from a period of unbelievably difficult national crisis. And so putting up some flags outside, maybe it's the only flags they could find in the local shop, but putting up some flags outside is sending the right messages, especially if you're trying to do something that's slightly audacious, slightly anti-establishment to show, look, we're on the right side of this picture, of this story. So they're up the lift.

• 5:32Alastair Sooke?

  And the doors open.

• 5:33James Fox?

  The doors open and what do they see?

• 5:35Alastair Sooke?

  So in they go into the show and they find a series of rooms. Some journalists who cover the show said there were maybe seven or eight, others say perhaps three or four, but we know there's more than one.

• 5:46James Fox?

  You say it with such prestige.

• 5:47Alastair Sooke?

  I know, it's just because in a way it's such banal detail. But the point is there are rooms and there are paintings in the rooms. And the rooms have been decorated and we know that the decoration was actually quite a big expense for this collective. And they have been hung, the walls of the rooms, with a reddish brown woolen fabric. And the word at the time from contemporaries is that that's actually a really nice aesthetically, it's very pleasing. It shows off the paintings to great advantage. And we also know that the paintings are very well lit. So they're using gaslighting. One of the things that they are gaslit, I should say, that sounds a bit weird putting it like that.

• 6:26Alastair Sooke?

  One of the things that we know about the so-called impressionists, as they would become known, is that they want the first exhibition that they're ...to be a pleasant environment, a good environment in which to see and show off works of art, because the salon could be quite dreadful with glaring reflections, this cacophony of different pictures arranged on the walls. And here you just have paintings in a couple of rows, arranged according to size, and it's a lot more comfortable. And the detail that I love is the artists involved have hired a warden who's there to kind of hang out and just be an attendant in the exhibition. But we also know that the artists themselves

• 7:08James Fox?

  Yes.

• 7:08Alastair Sooke?

  ...played this role. And I just have this kind of idea that there we are, going into the show, looking at the pictures, and in a corner is Claude Monet himself, or August Renoir. And perhaps you could then engage in conversation and learn about what their new painting was going to be. But there they are, engaging with their public.

• 7:27James Fox?

  I find that really, really appealing as an idea, that these figures would be just standing there saying, "Don't get too close to the pictures, please."

• 7:35Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 7:36James Fox?

  It was, you know, Degas himself, or whatever it is. The other thing that we should say, it's called, we call it, the first Impressionist exhibition. If you had walked around this space, the number of rooms you've described, I don't think you would have considered this an Impressionist exhibition at all. So there were 31 artists involved in the show. Only seven of those 31 would we today consider to be painting, Impressionist style paintings.

• 8:03Alastair Sooke?

  So this is less than a quarter?

• 8:04James Fox?

  So less than a quarter. So this is actually, it's a very different experience. You're not going from room to room and going, "Wow, this is extremely radical. This is another excellent plein air painting. This is another plein air painting." You're seeing dogs, you're seeing more traditional portraits, you're seeing some progressive works. It's a mixed bag, isn't it?

• 8:19Alastair Sooke?

  It's a really mixed bag. I mean, this kind of, it's motley. You know, in a way, it's a mess. I mean, eclectic is the sort of polite, kind way of putting it. You have some artists, I mean, I think the oldest is 40 years older than the youngest involved.

• 8:34James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Alastair Sooke?

  You have some artists who, they're also showing work at the salon, and their work is clearly more In keeping with that sort of slightly more academic, smooth-finished effect that was in vogue in more mainstream paintings shown at the salon. You have some artists who clearly were just complete second-rate hacks, just no-hopers. I'll just fire a few names at you, James, and you can tell me whether these are artists that are very close to your heart. Louis De Bruy.

• 8:59James Fox?

  Never heard of him.

• 9:00Alastair Sooke?

  Emilion Muller du Revage.

• 9:02James Fox?

  Never heard of him.

• 9:03Alastair Sooke?

  And Jean Baptiste Leopold Laver.

• 9:05James Fox?

  Never heard of him.

• 9:06Alastair Sooke?

  No, I don't think anyone's heard of these artists. They're just totally forgotten. There were some artists who were quite successful but were not impressionists. There's an Italian called Giuseppe De Nittis.

• 9:14James Fox?

  Oh, he's good.

• 9:15Alastair Sooke?

  He's a good artist, for sure. But you also have great diversity, great variety in terms of the medium. So you have paintings, you have sculpture, drawing, watercolour, there are prints, there are terracottas, marble, you have an enameler, there are enamels in there.

• 9:30James Fox?

  I did not know about the enameler.

• 9:32Alastair Sooke?

  And there's the opposite of the radical impressionist pictures. You've got, there's a bust in the show, which was created by an old senior artist involved called Auguste Ottin, O double T I N, sculptor. And his bust is of the earlier neoclassical artist Anger. And the bust was created in 1840.

• 9:53James Fox?

  Oh, right.

• 9:54Alastair Sooke?

  And it's in the first impressionist exhibition. So you're right, if you're looking around, you're probably used to things being a bit of a mixed bag because that's how it operated at the salon. But what you're not necessarily seeing is this group that is coherent, which seems to be trying to take down the art establishment of France.

• 10:17James Fox?

  You're not saying that at all, but there are some really, really great works of art in this exhibition. Do you have any favourites, Alastair?

• 10:26Alastair Sooke?

  I think there are a few. I mean, we're both, I'm sure, we have, there are lots and lots of picks. I mean, there's one I wanted to mention in passing, which is a Degas painting, which is called At the Races in the Countryside.

• 10:37James Fox?

  I love this one. Degas painted this actually five years earlier. It was painted in 1869. You can see it in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It's called Au Course en Provence, At the Races in the Countryside. It's a very odd picture. It's kind of, it's kind of genre-busting, isn't it? Because on the one hand, it's a scene of the races, well, obviously, we know that Degas loved painting races and horses in the countryside, but it's also a sort of family portrait. And compositionally, it's kind of extraordinary. It's cropped, you know, the horses are cropped to the right, there's a cropping on the left. So you've got this strange snapshot quality. We know that Degas was very interested in photography, so there's an element of photography here. It feels quite flat.

• 11:22James Fox?

  It feels perhaps in its very sort of parallel background, like it might have been inspired by Japanese prints.

• 11:29Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 11:30James Fox?

  And of course, at the very centre of the canvas, there's something, I mean, I think still even today, quite shocking.

• 11:37Alastair Sooke?

  I think that's why I certainly wanted to flag it. I mean, I love the peculiarity of the picture. So you can see, as you pointed out, you've got these racehorses. There's a race going on in the background and this is a, you know, really fashionable pastime, going to the races. It's sort of typical in a sense, impressionist concern of painting modern life. But that might seem to be the ostensible subject of the picture, but it's relegated to the background. And as you say, in the front, you have this carriage, which has come away from the group who are looking at the races. And it contains a number of figures and a pet. And the figures are a family group and the carriage is open. And in the backseat, you have two women and a baby. And one of the women is holding up a parasol.

• 12:21Alastair Sooke?

  And the parasol is shielding the other woman. And that woman is a wet nurse and she is breastfeeding the child of the woman holding the parasol. So the centre, if you like, the main action in this picture, and I think this does feel, despite those more conservative tendencies of Degas that you were describing in the earlier part, that is a radical thing to have in the heart of a picture, isn't it?

• 12:48James Fox?

  I mean, smack bang in the middle of this canvas, or at least laterally, in the middle of this canvas is a nipple.

• 12:54Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 12:55James Fox?

  With an exposed breast.

• 12:56Alastair Sooke?

  And it's spotlight by the sun. The parasol weirdly is protecting the wet nurse's head, but the baby and the breast are in full sunlight.

• 13:05James Fox?

  It's an extraordinary picture and it's just further evidence of the brilliance of Degas. I mean, he was challenging assumptions, he was challenging pictorial conventions in such subtle and canny and clever ways. And yet his pictures are always technically astonishing and incredibly beautiful. So that's one really great picture there, you would have seen that. What else would you have seen? I mean, probably the second most famous picture that was shown in this exhibition. We all come, of course, to the most famous, is a picture by Renoir.

• 13:33Alastair Sooke?

  This is the theatre box, La Loge.

• 13:35James Fox?

  La Loge.

• 13:36Alastair Sooke?

  And...

• 13:37James Fox?

  It's actually well-known. If you're British, you'll know it quite well, if you live in London at least, because it's one of the star exhibits in the Courtauld Gallery.

• 13:45Alastair Sooke?

  Which is a beautiful gallery and has an amazing collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. And this is, as you say, one of the standout masterpieces. So we're in the fashionable theatre world of 19th century Paris. And Renoir is painting not the action on stage, not whatever's going on in the wider theatre, but a really close-cropped image of two members of the audience who are sitting in a box. They are dressed to the nines. It's a man and a woman. And the man is sitting behind his female companion, and he's slightly more in shadow. And he is lifting some opera glasses, binoculars, to his eyes. And he's staring at something which we don't know what it is at all, which is off at a strange angle up above him.

• 14:28James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Alastair Sooke?

  Is he looking at other audience members? Is he looking possibly at other women? We don't quite know. But the star of the show is the female companion, the woman who's next to him. And she is dressed in this extraordinary, high-fashion, black-and-white striped gown with lots of jewellery. She's put down her opera glasses, her theatre glasses, and her face is very, very overly made up.

• 14:55James Fox?

  Yes, it's white, isn't it? White as a sheet. I think this picture is phenomenal. I'm not a big Renoir fan, actually. I think Renoir becomes pretty crap quite early on. But at the peak of his powers, in the 1860s and early 1870s, I mean, he's operating at an unbelievable level. I think this is one of his most fascinating pictures. It, as you say, depicts a theatre box which becomes quite a trope of modern painting in France at this time.

• 15:23Alastair Sooke?

  But it's new. It's new.

• 15:24James Fox?

  It's new. It's the first time it's ever been done, actually, when someone has treated the theatre box as a subject for art. And it's such a complex play of gazes, isn't it? Because both of them should be watching the show, whether it's an opera or a ballet or a play that was probably in a great building designed by Baron Housman. But neither of them is doing that. She's kind of looking out. She looks quite depressed to me. He is probably, yes, he's looking, he's looking up, so he's not looking at the stage.

• 15:53Alastair Sooke?

  No.

• 15:53James Fox?

  He's, he's, I think he's eyeing up some other woman.

• 15:56Alastair Sooke?

  I, I, almost definitely.

• 15:57James Fox?

  Yeah, he's eyeing up another woman in another box. She's kind of either being looked at by other men or is, you know, just thinking, this is a terrible evening. We don't know what their relationship is. They could be husband and wife, she could be some kind of courtesan.

• 16:09Alastair Sooke?

  Well, the courtesan thing is interesting because I think the giveaway is that makeup.

• 16:12James Fox?

  Hmm.

• 16:13Alastair Sooke?

  Because she's, she's wearing very expensive clothes, but there is this French word at the time, which was a cocotte, a sort of trend-setting prostitute, mistress. And you just wonder, and I think this is the audacity of this picture, whether that is who Renoir is depicting in La Loge.

• 16:33James Fox?

  Hmm. Do you know what I find even more audacious than that in this picture? If you look on the right of the canvas, and hopefully our listeners and viewers will be able to see this, you can see two blotches of black paint.

• 16:46Alastair Sooke?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:46James Fox?

  In the middle of that man's shirt.

• 16:48Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 16:49James Fox?

  What are they? I've, I've looked at this, I look, I've looked at these strokes of paint many times when I've been at the court hall. They don't seem to make any sense in terms of what they're representing. But I think they're just absolutely fantastic. And it's almost as though, was it an accident that he decides to keep there? Is it some, one of her feathers falling off her dress or something like that, if she's wearing feathers? I don't know. I, I don't know what it is.

• 17:15Alastair Sooke?

  I think.

• 17:15James Fox?

  But I love it.

• 17:16Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah. I think it must surely be something to do with her costume because it's, the, the white you refer to has got a creamy yellowy quality, which is different from his shirt behind that, which has a sort of blue because he's more in the shadows. And it, it, I suppose it adds to that sense. Those two black marks, they are very vigorous. It feels like something which is just almost showing off painting in that virtuosic way.

• 17:41James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Alastair Sooke?

  And the handling of this, the sketchiness of the picture is of course partly what makes it as well as the subject of modern life and the subject of theatre and the perhaps cocotte, makes it impressionist.

• 17:54James Fox?

  It's Renoir at the very peak of his powers before he. Declines precipitously.

• 18:00Alastair Sooke?

  To some rather strange nudes.

• 18:03James Fox?

  Yes.

• 18:03Alastair Sooke?

  She seems to paint a lot later in his career.

• 18:05James Fox?

  But there is one painting for which this exhibition is above all famous.

• 18:12Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 18:13James Fox?

  Do you want to talk us through this particular painting? It's called Impression Sunrise. It's by Claude Monet, who was one of the ringleaders of this exhibition. And it was painted in eighteen seventy-two.

• 18:26Alastair Sooke?

  So I started the last part with a brief description of it, but it's worth going back to it because talking about sketchiness in the Renoir, this is a totally sketchily painted view. But in this case, it's a view not of the interior of a theatre at all. It's a landscape and the landscape is showing a commercial industrial port, the basin of the port of Le Havre, which is where Monet himself grew up. And the colours of it are very, very purply lilac mauve blue. But right in the middle, you see this quite crisp in comparison reddish-orange, very bright disc, which is the sun.

• 19:09Alastair Sooke?

  And beneath, in the water, you have reflections from the sun, which always make me think of, you see these little strokes which have been applied at the end of the painting. If you imagine sort of, you know, when you have a crayon or pencil and you, pencil shavings are dropping off.

• 19:23James Fox?

  Yes.

• 19:23Alastair Sooke?

  And they're incandescent, they're sort of, you know, really bright orange and it feels like they've just dropped off from the sun. And there they are across the surface of the water. Nearby, you have the shadowy figure of these figures in boats. You can see in the distance, there are bigger ships. You can see lots of industrial buildings, there are factory chimneys. And the chimneys is important because they're belching out smoke. And you realise that this kind of haziness to the picture is partly industrial pollution.

• 19:49James Fox?

  Yes.

• 19:49Alastair Sooke?

  Monet loved spending time in London and he loved it because in those days, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it was still a smog-filled city. And he found it was the smog, all of the industrial pollution of the city that most people wanted desperately to get rid of because it was damaging health. He thought it was poetical and magical. And you have a sense, I think, of that interest and concern already here, painted in the early eighteen seventies.

• 20:12James Fox?

  Yes, I think when we think of Monet's work, we often think of him painting traditional. Rustic, bucolic things, we're thinking of painting haystacks and poppy fields. There is actually a wonderful poppy field in this particular exhibition. The exhibit's the one at Argentoye and painting Rouen Cathedral. But actually, he was painting modern subject matter in many places. And this is a modern industrial painting. It's a painting you can see in the background. You can see someone's rowing a boat in the foreground, but in the background, it's the smoke stacks. It's the steamships. And Le Havre was a port city that was at this time being rebuilt by industrialisation. It was being remodelled as an industrial heartland.

• 20:55James Fox?

  And you know, as Paris, France and Paris tried to re-establish its identity after the crises of the early 1870s, it was seen as absolutely central to their hopes of becoming a great power again, of dominating their colonies across the Atlantic and so on and so forth. So that is really, really important. The one thing I think is really interesting about this picture as well, that I like to say, is that he painted this before the exhibition. He painted this a year or two earlier.

• 21:21James Fox?

  Monet was born in Paris, but at the age of five, he moved with his father, who was a grocer, to Le Havre. So this is his childhood home. And he spent a little bit of time in England during the Franco-Prussian War and then returned. And then would often travel up to Le Havre because, you know, it was where his family was. It was where his background was. And he was at one point in the autumn of 1872, staying in a hotel on the harbour. And one morning, he looks out the window and in the space of a couple of hours, he paints this picture. Did you know there's long been a lot of debate about when specifically he painted this picture? Have you encountered the research yet?

• 21:59Alastair Sooke?

  Well, just remind me because I think we can be quite specific, can't we?

• 22:04James Fox?

  We can be very specific. We can be very specific because a few years ago, an American astronomer. And physics professor, a man called Donald Olson. Uh huh. He did this painstaking work. He looked at old photographs, he looked at old maps, he looked at celestial phenomena, he looked at weather conditions, he looked at tide times in order to try to work out when this picture was painted. And he reached a very definitive conclusion. He worked out that this painting was painted on the 13th of November 1872. It's actually the day before Monet's birthday, 13th of November 1872 at 7:35 in the morning. Is it that specific? That specific, 7:35 in the morning and- I mean, that's bonkers, isn't it?

• 22:48James Fox?

  It's bonkers. And I mean, he didn't paint it in the space of one minute, did he? But 7:35, and he even worked out which hotel room in the Hotel de la Miroite that Monet was staying in. So this is, you know, it's, it, it, it dates back to that period. He didn't paint the whole thing in that one go. So he painted most of the picture in the space of a couple of hours from the hotel window. So he's painting what's called wet on wet, isn't he, at that moment? Yeah, he's painting wet on wet. And then he returns to finish the picture the following year. And what he adds in 1873 is the sun, the gobstopper, as you describe

• 23:28James Fox?

  it, and the reflections underneath it. Alistair, you may know that I'm a big colour fanatic. I wrote a book about colour a few years ago. And I've always been fascinated by the colour in this picture. And particularly how when you look at that sun, you can't really get a grips with it with your retina. You know, the eyes, it's, it's something that, have you ever seen it in the, in the flesh, this picture? I have, yeah. So if you see it in the flesh, the sun just kind of dazzles your eyes. You can't quite, you can't quite focus on it. And there is a neuroscientist called Margaret Livingston, who's done a lot of work on this picture. And she has concluded that the reason why

• 24:10James Fox?

  that sun has this sparkling, dazzling quality to it is because it is isoluminant with the sky. So what that means is- Yeah. It's exactly the same lightness as the sky behind it. So if you were, maybe we can do this online, if you were to see this picture reproduced in black and white, the sun merges with the tones around it because the sun is exactly the same tonal value as the sky behind it. How interesting. And that means that when you look at this picture-

• 24:41James Fox?

  The part of your brain that processes hue is seeing the sun very clearly because the sun is almost a complementary colour to the sky, the oranges and the blues. But the part of your brain that processes tones, so lightness and darkness, cannot see it at all. And that creates this terrible conflict inside the brain, inside the visual cortex, which is why when you look at the sun in this picture, it dazzles like a real sun.

• 25:07Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the supposition is not that Monet could possibly have been aware, because I mean, you put in very scientific term, what's the term?

• 25:13James Fox?

  Isoluminance. No, he was not, I mean, it's remarkable that he arrived at this unbelievable visual solution inadvertently.

• 25:24Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 25:25James Fox?

  I mean, he obviously had a fantastic eye. There's a famous line, isn't there, by Cezanne? You know, he is only an eye, but what an eye. But he was able to arrive at this entirely by just looking and judging the quality of the paint. Turner did a similar thing. If you look at the great paintings by Turner, including Noham Castle Sunrise, again, the light, the yellowy light of the sun is completely isoluminant from the blue sky. So again, when you look at it, you can't really concentrate.

• 25:52Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's interesting you bring up Turner.

• 25:54James Fox?

  I think it's very important.

• 25:56Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, how much do you think this work of art, early 1870s, is, could be indebted to, is related to the work of JMW Turner?

• 26:07James Fox?

  I think massively so. And not enough people have said this. I think this is a really English style painting.

• 26:14Alastair Sooke?

  Whoa, okay.

• 26:15James Fox?

  I do, I do. Maybe it's because I'm a chauvinist or something and I believe in the English thing, but I think it really is. Let's remember, let's remind ourselves that Monet had only a couple of years earlier spent time in England. He did not want to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. He was quite progressive politically, didn't like the idea of this semi-imperial war taking place. He didn't want to be recruited. He'd already served, actually, a year in Algeria or so as a younger man. So he, like Pissaro, like Sizzi, like a number of other French artists at that time, escaped and he lived in London. And it was there that he would have seen, you've mentioned it already, the smoggy scenes over the Thames. The chimneys, the smokestacks. It was there that he met James Abbott McNeil Whistler.

• 27:00Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 27:00James Fox?

  Who was at this time in the 1870s, painting those wonderful nocturnes

• 27:05Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 27:05James Fox?

  of shimmering, smoggy, industrial scenes.

• 27:11Alastair Sooke?

  Poetic, very poetic.

• 27:12James Fox?

  Poetic scenes. And he would also have seen the great smoggy, misty, smoky, ethereal works of Turner.

• 27:21Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 27:21James Fox?

  And I think this is absolutely Monet's attempt to make an English style painting in France. I really do think so. Did you know something, actually? When, I've got this quote here, Stendhal, the great French author. Were you looking that one up yourself?

• 27:38Alastair Sooke?

  Just what you were saying reminded me, because I'd read this. I mean, it's very interesting what you're saying.

• 27:43James Fox?

  Was Stendhal, who stayed at this exact same hotel in Le Havre, said, "Le Havre is the most exact copy of England that France could have found." So I think there's a real sense that you go there and you depict that port scene. You are trying to capture this sense of industrial modernity that England, above all, in the world embodies at this time. And indeed, when this picture was exhibited at the so-called First Impressionist exhibition, one critic mistook it as a view of the Thames.

• 28:16Alastair Sooke?

  That is a very, very fascinating thesis. I suppose it makes me slightly think, I mean, I love that new context, that sort of way of thinking about this picture. But it's probably also worth trying to analyse what is it about this painting that says not art of the past from England, or even contemporary art from England, but what is it that is art of tomorrow? What is it that is impressionist about this? I mean, I know it's simple stuff, but what are the characteristics, the hallmarks of this picture that you would say? And indeed, some critics, as we're about to come on to, noticed and sensed something new going on.

• 28:59Alastair Sooke?

  What are they seeing in this, which is impressionist?

• 29:02James Fox?

  Well, I think the first thing is it is painted semi-planaire. I mean, he did it with the window open. He probably was inside the hotel room, but it was done in a single sitting.

• 29:14James Fox?

  In front of the subject, outdoors effectively.

• 29:17Alastair Sooke?

  Planaire, so open air painting being a big impressionist thing.

• 29:21James Fox?

  Yes, and indeed, Monet had had learned the art of plein air painting in Normandy, near Le Havre, from another great artist who was older than him called Eugene Boudin.

• 29:31Alastair Sooke?

  Beautiful beachscapes.

• 29:32James Fox?

  Lovely beachscapes, and Boudin was the person who said to him, look, you've got to get outdoors, paint things in front of the subject itself. And indeed, Monet convinced Boudin to show some work at the first impressionist exhibition. So that's obviously an important part of of what we consider to be impressionism. I think there's also this this the sketchiness that you've described so well.

• 29:53Alastair Sooke?

  The finish.

• 29:53James Fox?

  The finish. This is not finished, in other words.

• 29:56Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, no, indeed. I mean, it's kind of like huge, that haze, that sense of quite broken brushstrokes. Also, you know, you're referring to that sun. There is, for all of the sense of it being a cold and foggy morning and quite indistinct, the sun is so bright and luminous, and that sense of

• 30:16James Fox?

  Iso luminous.

• 30:17Alastair Sooke?

  Iso luminous. And that, we now know, is a key impressionist, would become a kind of really important impressionist concern, right?

• 30:25James Fox?

  Yeah, I think the other thing is, we've touched on this already, the modern subject matter. This, at first sight, you might think a rowing boat, a sunrise, what could be more universal and ancient than that? But actually, you look closer into the background, and you can see this is a picture of modern, it's a picture of industrial modernity.

• 30:43Alastair Sooke?

  Hmm.

• 30:44James Fox?

  So that's really important as well.

• 30:46Alastair Sooke?

  And and of course, this is, we're sort of almost telling a double story here, because it's the story of the exhibition, and it's the story of this painting. And this is the moment where they really become fused, because it's the response to this picture and the show that dictates, in many ways, how impressionism is seen, understood, and indeed, what it's known as.

• 31:11James Fox?

  Yes. So I think we should take a break now. But when we come back, we will find out just how this fascinating exhibition was received by the public and, of course, the critics. And you know what? You may be surprised.

• 31:26James Fox?

  A reminder that if you want to see the artworks we're discussing, you can switch to video in your podcast app at any time. And if you're enjoying this episode, please consider following Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts and maybe even leave a review.

• 31:43Alastair Sooke?

  Welcome back to Stories of Art. We are telling the story of the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. The exhibition has finally opened. We've described some of the highlights, but now it's time to find out what the Parisian public and the critics thought of it all.

• 32:00James Fox?

  So it opened on the 15th of April. I think we often think, in the public imagination, that this exhibition was some huge scandal, some nation-breaking scandal, where the whole France and the whole of the French press went haywire after seeing these revolutionary canvases. That just isn't true, is it? The truth is that not that many people visited the show.

• 32:23Alastair Sooke?

  Yep.

• 32:23James Fox?

  So I think it was 3,500 people. So they didn't need the turnstiles in the end, compared to 300,000 who went to see the salon.

• 32:32Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 32:32James Fox?

  So a small number of people visited. Very few critics bothered to write about it. And those who did write about it didn't necessarily dislike it.

• 32:40Alastair Sooke?

  They quite liked it.

• 32:41James Fox?

  Yes.

• 32:41Alastair Sooke?

  That's the thing. They maybe knew the artists and actually were kind of fans of this so-called new school of painting. They were going there for that reason.

• 32:47James Fox?

  Yeah. So, I mean, there's a great art historian called Paul Tucker, who wrote this pioneering piece about this exhibition. And he crunched the numbers and he found that only 14 publications reviewed this exhibition. And of those 14, six really liked it. So almost half really liked it. Three were mixed but generally positive. One was mixed but generally negative and four were negative. So in other words, more critics liked this exhibition. Then didn't.

• 33:20Alastair Sooke?

  But in a sense, and this is getting to the nub of it. And I think more recently, art historians have perhaps slightly expanded the number of articles. But it's still, the point stands that it relatively is small. But it's not such a good story. The good story is radical wild original art.

• 33:38James Fox?

  Yes.

• 33:38Alastair Sooke?

  Here it is shown to a boring bourgeois public and they're scandalized. And so lots of people, for understandable narrative reasons, have latched on to the response of a specific journalist.

• 33:52Alastair Sooke?

  A man called Louis Lacroix.

• 33:54James Fox?

  Ah, Louis Lacroix.

• 33:55Alastair Sooke?

  Louis Lacroix. And he worked for, he was an engraver, he was a painter. And since the late 1850s, he'd been working for a satirical magazine called Le Charivari. And it's in this magazine that 10 days after the show opens, his article is published. And the article is the first time in print anywhere that these artists are referred to as impressionists. That word is the headline of his article, which appears in the satirical magazine Le Charivari on April the 25th, 1874.

• 34:33James Fox?

  Yeah, it's, it's a pretty bizarre piece in which he imagines this very traditional academic painter, a kind of salon style painter or jurist, going around this exhibition and being horrified by what he sees. I just love it. He, he's dismayed by the legs on a Renoir dancer. There's a great moment when he arrives at this muddy ploughed field by Pizarro and presumes there's mud on his glasses, claims the glasses, puts them back on, realizes it's just a painting. He sees a Suzanne which sends him delirious. I don't blame him, it's not a good Suzanne.

• 35:07Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 35:08James Fox?

  But then he arrives in front of Monet's Impression Sunrise. And I've got the, the passage in front of me. Can I read it, Alastair?

• 35:15Alastair Sooke?

  Please.

• 35:16James Fox?

  I won't do a French accent.

• 35:18Alastair Sooke?

  Oh.

• 35:18James Fox?

  I'm sorry. He says, "His countenance was turning a deep red. A catastrophe seemed to be imminent, and it was reserved for Monsieur Monet to contribute the last straw."

• 35:34James Fox?

  Ah, there he is, there he is, he cried in front of number ninety-eight, which is the number of Impression Sunrise. What does that canvas depict? Look at the catalogue. Impression Sunrise. Impression? I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it. And what freedom, what ease of workmanship. Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

• 36:01Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, it's quite a good line, that, at the end, isn't it, that put-down?

• 36:05James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Alastair Sooke?

  Who says journalism isn't a proper craft?

• 36:07James Fox?

  [laughing]

• 36:08Alastair Sooke?

  And he's clearly playing up to, you know, that sort of sarcasm. He knows his audience, that's what they want.

• 36:15James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Alastair Sooke?

  You know, it's very similar today. I mean, there are certain parts of Fleet Street, naming no names, where you have a sense that your readership may be more or less, there's an appetite for novelty, originality, radical new directions in art. And here's an example of, a little bit like, do you remember Boris Johnson writing the two Brexit columns and just seeing which way the wind blows? L'Oréal knows which way the wind is blowing, he knows what his audience wants. And they want some cruel put-downs of contemporary art, and that's what he serves up.

• 36:48James Fox?

  But should we also perhaps say that we maybe shouldn't be taking L'Oréal too seriously? I don't know if L'Oréal was taking himself seriously. I think we have to say that he's writing for a publication that is a satirical publication. It's, I suppose it's the equivalent of Private Eye.

• 37:05Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 37:05James Fox?

  I don't think the audience, I don't think his readers are expecting sustained, detailed, sensitive art historical analysis like your readers are.

• 37:13Alastair Sooke?

  No, indeed.

• 37:14James Fox?

  They are reading it for a laugh. And so I think he's, and I think that makes it all the more remarkable. He's just having a laugh.

• 37:21Alastair Sooke?

  He's having a good time.

• 37:22James Fox?

  He would never imagine that the words he used, just to have, you know, the punchlines he used, would end up changing the language we use in the history of art.

• 37:31Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, the really fascinating thing is that, is to actually look at some of those other pieces that were published. And there's one other writer who I think is the antithesis of L'Oréal. He's more in the mould you describe of an intelligent, sort of sensitive, supportive, ultimately, critic who's excited by new tendencies. He's an art historian, a man called Jules Antoine Castenari. He'd been a defender of Corbeil. He was friends with Monet, friends with Charles Baudelaire, and he writes a review, and it... It's published, it's only four days.

• 38:02James Fox?

  Twenty nine of April.

• 38:02Alastair Sooke?

  So it's interesting that because the way he writes it doesn't suggest that he's read the Loire piece and he has a coinage, which is essentially he's bringing impressionism in as well. But the difference here is that he's actually looking and thinking about what he's seeing and trying to express and articulate what makes it different, what makes it worthy of comment. So he's describing in his exhibition review, this entire group. And he says that for them, once the impression, that's the word he's using, is captured, they declare their role terminated. So if one wants to characterize them with a single word that explains their efforts, one would have to create the new term, impressionists. They

• 38:43Alastair Sooke?

  are impressionists in the sense that they render not a landscape, but the sensation produced by a landscape. And the word itself has entered their language. It is not landscape, it is impression that Monsieur Monet's Sunrise is called in the catalogue.

• 38:57James Fox?

  That's incredible.

• 38:58Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, that is really on the money.

• 39:00James Fox?

  That's good analysis, isn't it? And it hasn't really dated at all. I think many people would describe impressionism in those terms, just now, 130 years later.

• 39:09Alastair Sooke?

  I mean.

• 39:10James Fox?

  Hundred and fifty years later.

• 39:11Alastair Sooke?

  Even more widely, if you think about, like, what is the modern art project? It's not necessarily replicating appearance and reality. It's the prism, it's the subjectivity of the artist and you're seeing reality through that, that lens, if you like. And that's what he's describing. They render not a landscape, but the sensation produced by a landscape, the impression of it.

• 39:32James Fox?

  This is such a fascinating moment in time. And it's not just a fascinating year, it's a fascinating couple of days. Because in this period between 25th of April and the 29th of April, you can actually begin to see the term, the idea of impressionism crystallizing in this very indirect way. It's because there are a couple of other critics who use the word impressionism at this time as well. It's fascinating. Later movements, of course, they choose their own names. You know, the futurists choose their own names. But this is something where it's kind of just emerging so delicately from the ether. It's fascinating.

• 40:11Alastair Sooke?

  Well, I, I, I think it's a really, I mean, you're right. There's a sort of sensitivity to the moment of the birth of this movement. You're, it's interesting to compare the futurism. There is, the futurists had a manifesto. There is no aesthetic manifesto to this, this group of artists who are exhibiting in this place. And although we've picked out a couple of the more famous pieces that refer to impressionists, you do have, in that sensitive moment of the birth of this movement, alternative names that people are trying out. So some people sense in the, the way they're painting, something quite political.

• 40:46James Fox?

  Yes.

• 40:46Alastair Sooke?

  And quite radical in that sense. And they, they refer to, you know, this gang of nihilists or communards or fireraisers paintings. I think there's another.

• 40:57James Fox?

  They were called the Intransigents.

• 40:59Alastair Sooke?

  The Intransigents, that's the one. And that's the one that actually sticks for a bit. So that appears, I think, in the Le Figaro newspaper. And there's a critic there who tries to name the movement and says, I would call them the Intransigents. And for a while it worked.

• 41:11James Fox?

  Yeah, because they were being intransigent. If you're looking at it from the perspective of the salon, which has complete control over the art world, really. These are a group of people who are, who are, you know, cocking a snoop. It was not seen to be something that an artist should do, should be organising their own exhibition. Institutions did that, maybe dealers did that, but artists themselves organised their own exhibition.

• 41:34Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 41:34James Fox?

  On their own terms, that was seen as intransigent.

• 41:38Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, we've spoken a bit about Degas. He had his own name for the group. He wanted to call them La Capucine, after the location, the Boulevard de Capucine, where the show was held, meaning nostalgia. But that doesn't, I mean, it didn't stick clearly. It doesn't convey any of what you're describing, where. Today, I think a lot of people slightly, almost, of course, Impressionism is still really popular, but they might dismiss it as being, it's too familiar, it's too chocolate boxy. But it's easy as a result to lose sight of that fiery political commitment, the kind of more radical elements of it. And I think, had they been known as La Capucine Movement, that wouldn't have really conveyed what they were about.

• 42:19James Fox?

  There was another name they were given, which I think is actually the most accurate of all to describe the exhibition, is where they were called the Independents.

• 42:25Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 42:26James Fox?

  And that's really what they were. I mean, they were trying to just organise their own exhibitions independently. But ultimately, Impressionism sticks. Did you know there is actually, the word Impressionist was around at that time?

• 42:40Alastair Sooke?

  Well, this is, this is important.

• 42:41James Fox?

  It had a very different meaning.

• 42:42Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah. So where do you see that, as a sort of wider context?

• 42:45James Fox?

  The term Impressionism was used within the domain, believe it or not, of travel writing.

• 42:49Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 42:50James Fox?

  So there was a great surge in travel writing, travel literature at the time, and lots of accounts of travel writing where people would say, I would make an impression of going to see, you know, Pompeii.

• 43:00Alastair Sooke?

  Yes.

• 43:01James Fox?

  Or an impression of what it was like to see the White Cliffs of Dover. And the people who wrote these impressions of the places they visited were called Impressionists.

• 43:09Alastair Sooke?

  So we should scotch this idea that Louis Lacroix came up with the name for this group.

• 43:14James Fox?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Alastair Sooke?

  Because it's a term that's actually not maybe in common kind of currency at the time, but it's around.

• 43:20James Fox?

  Yes.

• 43:20Alastair Sooke?

  It's in the ether. And clearly, you see at this moment, artists themselves, in Monet's case, giving his painting that title, and then the critics, it just is zeitgeisty. And that's what they're channeling.

• 43:30James Fox?

  Yeah, that's what they're channeling. But they don't actually take up the term Impressionism themselves.

• 43:36Alastair Sooke?

  Well, they do a little later.

• 43:37James Fox?

  For a while.

• 43:37Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:38James Fox?

  So, before we finish, Alistair, before we move to the legacy of this great moment, let's just talk through whether this exhibition was a success on its own terms.

• 43:49Alastair Sooke?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 43:50James Fox?

  It wasn't.

• 43:52Alastair Sooke?

  I mean, you could go further, James. It was a bit of a disaster.

• 43:56James Fox?

  It was a disaster.

• 43:57Alastair Sooke?

  It was a disaster. So around three and a half thousand people came to visit the exhibition. They're each paying one franc. There were around about a hundred works that were offered for sale. And of course, the society is hoping that any work that's sold, they get a commission, 10%. Only four works are recorded as having been sold at the exhibition. And the bottom line is that when it closes, it's open for a month. The society has almost 278 francs. And that has to be set against their liabilities of 3,713 francs. So they're out of pocket, each member of this collective,

• 44:42Alastair Sooke?

  to a tune of around about 184 francs, which is three times the subscription charge they're paying in the first place.

• 44:49James Fox?

  To be involved in it. So which is like, today, that would be about a thousand pounds. I mean, this is a very significant outlay and cost for people like Monet, for people like Renoir, who didn't have any money. So, I mean, and let us remember, the purpose of this exhibition was not to advance some new artistic cause. The purpose of the exhibition was to sell pictures.

• 45:08Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah. And so they to- on that main thing, they failed.

• 45:12James Fox?

  They failed miserably. And so at the end of the year, the end of 1874, by a surprise, unsurprisingly unanimous vote, they wound up for company. But it wasn't the end of these so-called Impressionist exhibitions, was it?

• 45:27Alastair Sooke?

  No, and I think here we're sort of like moving into the final chapter of the story. And it's worth thinking about how important this exhibition was. Because you're right, there are a series of other exhibitions that come later, which are known collectively as the Impressionist Exhibitions. And for many people, the Impressionist Exhibition of 1877, which was much more concentrated and had artists who were, rather than Dogman and all of his second-rate cohorts, they were the Impressionists themselves, showing their work and showing work that was really first-rate.

• 46:04James Fox?

  Yes.

• 46:04Alastair Sooke?

  So aesthetically, it was much more coherent. And there are some art historians who've tried to argue, look, The first Impressionist exhibition so called of 1874 isn't worthy of the name.

• 46:16James Fox?

  No.

• 46:16Alastair Sooke?

  The first Impressionist exhibition really should be the one in 1877, which is the one, the only time when the artists themselves are using the name Impressionist to refer to themselves, and they even publish a journal and it has a title, L'Impressioniste.

• 46:31James Fox?

  And you know who was behind the choice of that name?

• 46:34Alastair Sooke?

  Tell me.

• 46:35James Fox?

  It was Renoir.

• 46:36Alastair Sooke?

  Right.

• 46:36James Fox?

  And I've got a little quote there. He said, with, with not much humility, he said, "I was the one who insisted on keeping this name Impressionists", which had really caught on. It was like saying to passersby, "Here you will find a kind of painting that you dislike. If you come, that will be just too bad. You won't be getting a refund on your Tensu admission fee." So they, they take on that name partly to take on the scandalous implications of it.

• 47:06Alastair Sooke?

  Yeah.

• 47:06James Fox?

  And partly because actually, in retrospect, in hindsight, it's a pretty good name for these particular artists and what they're trying to achieve.

• 47:14Alastair Sooke?

  I think it's a good name. I think it's a good name. But the question remains, what do we make of the 1874 show, the story of which we have told in some depth across these two parts? Because the old line is that here's this show, here's this scandal, Impressionism is invented, Impressionism is baptized and named, Impressionism is born. More recently, there have been a number of art historians, and we've been drawing upon a lot of their research, who were arguing, well, actually, no, that's not right at all. And some have even said, I think you used this phrase in an earlier section of this conversation, that the 1874 show was a, quote, "non-event".

• 47:58Alastair Sooke?

  There are two extremes there, and I genuinely, I find it quite hard to navigate between them and to work out how we should think of it. I mean, it isn't a non-event, clearly. It isn't the scandalous event of popular myth. How, how do you think about it?

• 48:15James Fox?

  Well, it doesn't invent Impressionism.

• 48:18James Fox?

  Because I think that these artists, if we're using that term, most of these artists are making impressionist paintings long before this exhibition is staged. Monet is making some of his most famous so-called impressionist pictures in the late 1860s. So is Renoir, so is Pissaro. I think its importance is not in the paintings, it's not in the sales, we know there weren't many sales, it is in its challenge to the establishment. And it's giving a sense to a whole bunch of disgruntled artists that they could do this another way, that the art world could be bent to their will, rather than them having to submit to institutional demands.

• 49:01James Fox?

  So I think in this new democratic iteration, if you like, of what an art, what the art world could be, I think it is very significant. And you know, Alistair, you know, the story of modern art is in many ways, it's a story of rebellion, it's the story of artists challenging the establishment, challenging and critiquing old institutions and old ways of doing things, and shocking critics like yourselves and shocking public tastes. And I think if that is an important aspect of the story of modern art, this has to be an important part of it.

• 49:38Alastair Sooke?

  I would love at this moment to fly the flag for my fellow journalists and critics, because I think there's something here about the reception of that first show that was important, genuinely was important. And it's easy to think of, you know, the old cliche of a piece in a newspaper today is tomorrow's fish and chips paper, but actually, we've been quoting a long time afterwards some of the pieces, some of the criticism that was written about the show, and when it was good, it is... Defining how subsequently people think about what Impressionism was. There is a role for art critics, James.

• 50:21Alastair Sooke?

  I believe it, and I think that this first exhibition of the Impressionists may even reflect that too.

• 50:27James Fox?

  Yes, it does embody this, almost this tectonic shift in modernity itself, where you're seeing the breakdown of these old state institutions, and you're seeing these new forces emerge in the art world. The power of the artist as an individual outside of the institution, the power of critics, and the power of scandal. And in that sense, I think this particular moment is very, very exciting.

• 50:53Alastair Sooke?

  Totally. I mean, despite the fact that at one point when I was reading out those statutes of the joint stock company, I feared we'd lose all of our listeners.

• 51:00James Fox?

  Well, that was a highlight for me.

• 51:01Alastair Sooke?

  That was a highlight for you. I think that this has been a brilliant story, actually. I've loved going through it with you, thank you. But it is clearly this pivotal moment in art history. And hopefully, it's not the only pivotal art historical moment that we're going to be talking about in this series, James.

• 51:17James Fox?

  We have many more to come.

• 51:19Alastair Sooke?

  But I guess for now, goodbye.

• 51:21James Fox?

  Goodbye.

• 51:29James Fox?

  If you've enjoyed this episode, please do follow Stories of Art wherever you get your podcasts, and maybe even leave a review.