An Impression dans La Sous-Bois

1883 and 1884 were two of the most productive years in Lavery's long career. They were spent for the most part, at Grez-sur-Loing, a sleepy village, five miles south of Fontainbleau. Here, finding Barbizon overcrowded in 1875, British, Irish and American students had established an artists' colony.1 Its fame quickly grew and when one of its protégés, William Stott of Oldham, was awarded a medal of honour at the Paris Salon in 1882, Grez seemed to offer a passport to success. Lavery, attending the ateliers of Julian and Colarossi in Paris, went there for the summer months of 1883 and found the experience so invigorating that he resolved to return. After a further term drawing the model, he was back in Grez at the beginning of 1884 to paint a picture for the forthcoming Salon.2

This was to be a sous-bois, a picture executed in the woods near the village, showing an elderly peasant herding his goats at evening. Lavery's La Rentrée des Chêvres (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), was full of the ideas of Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose Le Père Jacques (Milwaukee Art Centre) he had also seen in the Salon.3 Bastien-Lepage taught the painters of Lavery's generation that the encounter with a figure in the depths of the forest involved complex spatial layering, if it was to be truly naturalistic. The sketchy background haze of foliage should be thinly painted, while the middle distance motif, a figure group - in Lavery's case a goatherd - should be laid on top. Foreground details, closest to the spectator, should stand out boldly. As a former photographer's assistant, Lavery intuitively grasped this concept, akin to that of the 'depth of field' in a photograph. For the 'naturalist' or plein air painter the eye should be like a lens.

This new methodology is important when we consider the recent discovery - An Impression dans le Sous-Bois. In this canvas the winter trees of La Rentrée des Chêvres have come into leaf, and sunlight filters through their upper branches. Lavery sets out to analyse the effect that dazzled earlier Barbizon landscapists, Theodore Rousseau and Narcise-Virgile Diaz de la Pena.4 Where they concentrated upon flickering light falling through foliage, Lavery looked carefully at the forest floor. Individual tufts of grass, weeds and saplings assume enormous importance if the figure, standing back there in space, is not to be incorrectly scaled. The random fall of light which could play havoc with the processes of patient observing and recording, was essential to give truth to what might be referred to as an 'impression'.

Lavery's use of this term to describe one of his works in 1884 is challenging. By this date seven of the eight 'Impressionist' exhibitions had been held in Paris and in recent years the movement had undergone a series of crises which saw Monet attempting the Salon for one last time, and other landscapists withdrawing, upset by Degas's dogmatism.5 Debates within the group mirrored those in the wider artistic community concerning the meaning of the term 'impression'. Was it a spontaneous response to nature? Must it be painted on the spot? Could it be re-worked in the studio and combined with other 'impressions'? Was it, as Degas insisted, an artificial construct? Emile Zola maintained that Bastien-Lepage was superior to the Impressionists because he knew how to 'realise' his impressions.6 Where they could not proceed beyond sensations produced on the motif, his superior naturalism took their moments of truth - petits sensations - and used them to greater purpose. All these issues are likely to have been aired in the smoke-filled cafés of the quartier latin, and Lavery, when he set off for Grez in the first few weeks of 1884, as the present canvas makes clear, hoped to resolve them.

If this was simply his intention, the actual experience overhauled, enriched and re-stated the problem. Painting amid the sounds and smells of nature with its accidental effects and sudden disturbances, was not like working in Julian's atelier. Lavery was ready to take on these new complications, recognising that in them there was something else - a fleeting sense of the spirit of the place. Hereafter he would be an 'artist-reporter' and although he acquired a spacious studio in South Kensington, he was just as happy setting up his easel in the street, in the salon, on the shore or by a woodland path. The artist should be able to paint anything, in any circumstances. As he was noting his Impression, his new credo was eloquently enunciated by Robert Louis Stevenson.

'Let the young painter go to Fontainbleau, and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach him the mechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and botanize, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will learn - or learn not to forget - the poetry of life and earth, which, when he has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.'7

Having been among the first wave of Grez visitors, Stevenson was instrumental in weaving its magic. From here in 1876, with Walter Stimpson, he set off by canoe on An Indian Voyage.8 The scene cannot have been unlike Lavery's The Bridge at Grez 1883 (private collection). Sitting in the woods at Grez captivated Stevenson. The perfumes of the trees were intoxicating; the birdsong, a call from another, more perfect world. One might suddenly see a passing peasant child, but the scented air would bring back the summer courts of olden days that were held at Fontainbleau.

'Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret aromatic odour of the woods, not like the smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in summer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk and bergamot upon the woodland winds.'9

Lavery may have known these words before he went to Grez, but in painting his Impression he resisted the temptations of the fête galante.

What do we take from this picture? The careful observation of spatial transition is replicated in the handling of the garden in On the Loing, An Afternoon Chat, 1884 (fig. 1, Ulster Museum, Belfast), while the palette, a range of lush greens and ochres, is carried into La Pêcheuse (private collection).10 These important canvases and others share with An Impression dans le Sous Bois that same purposeful placing of a figure, back there in space. Sudden awareness of this apprentice/apparition makes the Impression so memorable, and leaves room for other imaginings.

1 For a full account of the Grez colony, which included Scandinavian and Japanese artists, see Toru Arayashiki ed., exhibition catalogue, The Painters in Grez-sur-Loing, Japan Association of Art Museums, 2000.
2 K. McConkey, '... the incommunicable thrill of things ...', British and Irish Artists at Grez-sur-Loing' in T. Arayashi, ed., 2000, pp. 48-78, 255-262.
3 For further reference see The Glasgow Boys, exhibition catalogue, London, Fine Art Society and Edinburgh, Bourne Fine Art, 2005, no. 9. For reference to Le Père Jacques, see D. Lobstein, ed., Jules Bastien Lepage 1848-1884, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée d'Orsay, 2007, pp. 152-3.
4 See S. Adams, The Barbizon School and the Origins of Impressionism, 1994, London.
5 J. Isaacson, The Crisis of Impressionism, 1878-1882, University of Michigan Art Museum, 1980; see also C.S. Moffett, ed., The New Painting, Impressionism 1874-1886, Geneva, 1986, pp. 293-418.
6 Emile Zola, Le Bon Combat, De Courbet aux Impressionistes, Paris, 1975, p. 206.
7 R.L. Stevenson, 'Fontainbleau: Village Communities of Painters - IV', The Magazine of Art, 1884, p. 345.
8 R.L. Stevenson, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, London, 1924.
9 R.L. Stevenson, 'Forest Notes', 1876, quoted from Essays of Travel, London, 1912, p. 146.
10 K. McConkey, Sir John Lavery, Edinburgh 1993. For La Pecheuse see Truth to Nature, exhibition catalogue, Pyms Gallery, London.

K.M.