More than 100 years later, it seems pointless to comment on the irony of how impressionism, a school of painting associated with hardworking peasants and an assault on time-honored aesthetics has become popular and profitable.
Yet Andrea Glimcher of PaceWildenstein, the New York gallery that programs exhibitions at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, takes the trouble to inform visitors, via Audioguide, that the gallery's latest show "tells the story of how art and philosophy combined in the cauldron of Revolutionary France." The exhibition, The Impressionist Landscape from Corot to Van Gogh, does not dwell on that volatile mix. And it does little beyond its first section, devoted to the proto-impressionist Barbizon painters, to indict the upper classes who "systematically ignore the realities of the working class," as Glimcher's narration puts it.
So relax; a carefree Vegas vacation remains just that. But for those who like to mull such matters, the issue lingers in the rosy ocher twilight of Jean-François Millet's "Washerwomen" (c. 1855). One woman stands on a rock to heap laundry on the shoulders of another as a lunar sliver emerges from Millet's splendid crepuscular haze. No doubt they have been working since before dawn. The same could be said of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's "Twilight" (1845-60), in which the labor of two women is reduced to near insignificance in scale.
Millet and Corot were not so much pleading a worker's plight as stressing the beauty and nobility of such a scene. The land was the seat of another nearly revolutionary premise, that a painting could be an attempt to set a conception of time and place, as opposed to, say, an incidentally pretty setting for a mythological encounter.
The title "landscape" is broadly framed; it includes maritime scenes such as Louis-Eugène Boudin's sketchy but delicate "Harbor at Honfleur" (1865) and Johann Barthold Jongkind's sedate "Harbor Scene in Holland" (1868). Moreover, it gives a nod to the other milieu for which the impressionists were well-noted, the urban setting. Compare, for instance, the leaden, wintry townscape of Camille Pissarro's "Pontoise, the Road to Gisors in Winter" (1873) with Claude Monet's "Rue de la Bavolle, Honfleur" (c. 1864), a more genial view up a village street, divided by a shadow line. A man stopped in the center, as if by the view, seems to validate the viewer's interest.
Probably for most visitors, the tour through the Barbizons will be a tutorial endured to reach the promised impressionists. And they will not be disappointed by treasures such as "Woman with a Parasol and Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside" (about 1874–76), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in which vibrant brushwork belies the sense of tranquility; or Vincent van Gogh's "Enclosed Field with Ploughman" (October 1889), whose volatile brushwork underlines the artist's deteriorating mental state.
For those who care, however, the exhibition delivers the art-historical context whose absence some deplored with regard to its predecessor, Monet: Masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Glimcher's narration takes the trouble to note the vital influences of Boudin and Constant Troyon on Monet. And you might enjoy drawing parallels between Théodore Rousseau's "Pool in the Forest" (early 1850s) and Paul Gauguin's "Forest Interior (Sous Bois)" (1884).
Still, irony abides. The predictable profitability of anything "impressionist" makes this loan arrangement between the MFA and the BGFA almost too easy, even as this show delivers more than the last. A similar but larger Monet, Renoir and the Impressionist Landscape, comprising some of the same paintings from the BFA, had a four-museum tour about five years ago. Is it too much to hope for something more audacious next time?