The Boating Party by Mary Cassatt

“I have touched with a sense of art some people – they felt the love and the life. Can you offer me anything to compare to that joy for an artist?” Mary Cassatt

One of only 3 or 4 female impressionists, Mary Cassatt was also an American in Paris. She seems to have been independent of mind and, as with all female painters until quite recently, she took a path not easily trodden. Her longtime friendship and collaboration with the sometimes difficult Edgar Degas makes me think that she held her own without compromise.

Cassatt painted The Boating Party when she was 49 years old and by then quite successful. The Boating Party depicts an unknown woman, baby, and man in a sailboat. The colours are saturated and dramatic. Not exactly pastel, however a little other-worldly. I love the yellow-green on the boat. The boat itself is quite strange with a canoe stern, a sail that appears to be fighting with the oarsman – the wind looks to be blowing opposite to the direction of travel – and if there’s a sail, where are the boom and the mast? Perhaps because of all these technical quibbles, the painting works superbly. Mary Cassatt has crafted a composition that has enough reality that you know what´s going on and equally, designed a picture space to resonate in our brains.

It is an unusual painting in Cassatt’s œuvre. Whilst it does show her familiar theme of a mother and child, most of her other paintings are set in interiors or gardens. It’s one  of her most ambitious and largest paintings.

 

The Impressionists and their Colour

The Impressionists changed the world of colour and in this section, I review their lasting legacy. Colour theory described how colours work together and this, along with the advent of tube paints enabled painters to paint where they previously couldn’t. Additionally, the invention of the camera loosened the bonds of reality – all of these really changed the game.

In the following video, I expand on how the Impressionists changed the face of painting, using colour in fundamentally new ways:

Relative colour exercise

Here’s the relative colour exercise from the video: look unflinchingly at the dot in the center of the red circle for about a minute; then look at the dot in the center of the white circle.

 

Lessons from the Impressionists

The Impressionists were the first group of painters to use colour differently. They went from primarily using colour for description to experimenting with expressive colour. They knew the colour theory and practice from lesson 2 and used it for impressionistic rather than descriptive purposes. This consisted of 3 main elements:

The colour of Shadow

Higher use of full-chroma (high colour content) throughout, particularly in the shadows. Previously, painters had dulled down shadow areas by taking out colour with the complement, darkening toward black in the same colour range. The Impressionists, seeking to maintain vibrancy, moved to cooler versions of the in-light colour, essentially swinging around the colour wheel rather than going through the center towards black. So bright oranges become crimsons, purples and blues. Yellows move from green to blue and indigo. I don’t imply that they did this consistently: they were in reality a fairly disparate variety of painters, turned into a movement by history. However, the shift in use of colour exists and continues with us today.

 

Placement of complements

Whereas mixed complements neutralize each other, placing them next to each other has the opposite effect: it creates excitement and vibrancy, each emphasizing the other. Complements, directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, are in effect the opposite and if you like, create a stronger colour gradient or cliff. The fundamental characteristic is that all colour is relative and placing dissimilar colours one by the other makes for high relative contrast: red next to green, blue with orange, yellow with purple. Seems familiar – just ask the advertising industry, they know full well how to grab your attention!

Broken colour

The Impressionists also used dabs of pure primary colour, placed next to each other, to blend in the eye, often with short, broken brush strokes. This “optical blending” was taken to the limit with Pointillism: Seurat and Signac being perhaps best known for this. This group used tiny dots of pure colour, essentially pixelating the image for it to be reconstructed in the eye of the viewer. All impressionists did some of this, placing yellow and blue to form green, red and yellow in lieu of orange, reds and blues for purple. Using this as part of a picture can be very effective, although I have never been totally convinced about the pure Pointillist theory, as these images leave me a bit cold. As a footnote, I’d also mention that I’ve not encountered much Pointillism in the world of watercolour.

Exercise

• Paint from a reference of your choice. Use cues from impressionism in use of colour in the shadows: cooler but still noticeable. Add in colour to the cast shadow areas as well. Brushstrokes of broken colour and placement of complements will complete the impressionist effect!