f nature connected him with the Barbizon painters, but unlike them Corot did not strive for an accurate reproduction of landscape. His poetic landscapes are echoes of the artist's own experiences. "If you are really moved, "said Corot," the sincerity of your feelings will be felt by others. "
The work of the leading painters of the realist movement, Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) and Gustav Courbert (1819-1877), developed in the 1850s and '60s. Millet was the first among his contemporaries to depict French village life, with what was then unusual degree of profundity and veracity. The Hermitage possesses only one of his paintings, Peasant Women Carrying Firewood .
Courbert, an active figure in the Paris Commune, was the major representative of the realist movement in painting and ardently defended the right of the artist to portray contemporary life. The only Courbert in the Hermitage is the Landscape with a Dead Horse which, because of its poor state of preservation, does not give us any real idea of his skill as an artist. The choice of theme in this painting represents a challenge to the "official" art, because Courbert maintains here that the artist should be concerned with life in all its diversity. p> Room 320. Towards the 1870s Impressionism reached its peak in France, the movement having originated as a protest against the rigid convention which prevailed in official art. The Impressionists emerged as heirs to the realist traditions and enriched painting with their fresh, joyful colours, their representation of light, and exquisite rendering of atmosphere. They drew only from life capturing the spontaneity and naturalness of the first visual impression. In conveying the wealth of colour in the real around them Impressionists attempted to catch and to record its face, forever changing under the play of light.
Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) embodies the principles and methods of Impressionism in portrait painting. Renoir did not attempt to reveal in his portraits intricate feelings or emotions; he caught the spontaneous movement, the half-smile, the gentle reverie of his model. Unaffected animation and simplicity characterize his Girl with a Fan and Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary . Renoir's colours are notable for their freshness, the richness of hues, and the extremely delicate transition from one tone to the next.
The work of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) is represented by some pastels- Woman Combing Her Hair, After the Bath, Dancers and Woman at Her Toilet.
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Room 319. One of the leading Impressionist painters was Claude Monet (1840-1926), whose picture Impression: Sunrise , exhibited in Paris in 1874, gave the name to the whole movement. An early work of his, Lady in the Garden (1867), reflects the first success of the new manner of painting. Abandoning black and subdued tones, Monet painted the shade in color depending on the surrounding milieu. The woman's white dress in the shade of the parasol, for example, acquires a bluish hue against the background of the green foliage and the blue sky. In the landscape Pond at Montgeron (1876-77) the countryside is filled with the subtle, barely perceptible movement of currents of moist air, in which the outlines of things melt into nothing. Gradually the rendering of light and air becomes Monet's main them and he portrays one and the same subject several time in different lights, stripping things of their of their materiality. br/>
Room 318 . Paris street life with its characteristic bustle, commotion and endless flow of traffic and pedestrians was captured by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) in his paintings The Boulevard Montmartre in Paris and La Place du Theatre-Francais in Paris.
The eleven paintings by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) make it possible to observe the main stages in the development of the artist's work. Unlike the Impressionists Cezanne tried to reveal the materiality and plasticity of whaterver he deplicted. Typical in this way is the landscape Banks of the Marne (1888), in which he painted a tranquil scene from nature, as through trying to immortalize on canvas her immutable qualities. Still-life painting was Cezanne's favourite genre. His still lifes are simple: a wooden table, two or three faience vessels, some fruit, all these objects possessing some special distinctive corporeity peculiar to Cezanne. To preserve their "eternal" qualities-weight and volume-Cezanne made the form geometric, building it up with thick strokes of bright green, orange and blue. br/>
Rooms 317 and 316 contain examples of the work of the Post-Impressionist painters Van Gogh and Gauguin. br/>
Room 317. The Hermitage has four paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890): View of the Arles, Ladies of Arles (Memory of ...
