Event Description
Join your ICDC friends for a tour of the National Gallery of Art’s collection of 19th century French paintings. This is a great opportunity to meet other ICDC members who appreciate art. Please note that we will be meeting at the Cascade Café, located underground between the East and West buildings of the National Gallery of Art at the designated time. When you arrive at the Cascade Café, please look for us at the end of the moving walkway adjacent to the Cascade Waterfall.
As the nineteenth century began in France, the official Salon presided over by members of the Academy dictated the fates of artists and direction of public tastes. This soon began to change. Realists turned convention on its head to give heroic character to everyday subjects. Manet scandalized the public with his images of modern life. Other impressionists tried to capture fleeting effects of light and atmosphere.
For two hundred years, the Academy, the School of Fine Arts, and the Salon, the official exhibition, had fostered the French national artistic tradition. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the academic system had degenerated. During the 1860s and 1870s, the artists who later became known as the impressionists concluded that the smoothly idealized presentation of academic art was formulaic and artificial. Their relatively loose, open brushwork underscored their freedom from the meticulously detailed academic manner.
These artists thought that if their work was exhibited fairly, it would gain acceptance. They sought favorable viewing conditions such as good lighting and ample space between paintings, and they also wanted to exhibit more works than the two allowed by Salon rules. In 1874, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, and Sisley led a number of friends to form an association and publicly presented the first group exhibition independent of the official Salon. They called themselves "Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc., Inc." to avoid descriptive titles and pejorative epithets. Critics noted their unorthodox style and especially a work exhibited by Monet with the title Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris) and sarcastically dubbed them "impressionists." The group, which presented eight exhibitions in all, survived until 1886. By then the core impressionists were beginning to attain a degree of popular success.
The cost of the tour is used to cover the operational expenses of the International Club of DC and is not related to the National Gallery of Art. Admission to the National Gallery of Art and to all its exhibitions, tours, and other public educational programs is always free of charge.