"The Bridge at Argenteuil... is one of the best examples of early mature Impressionism, in which the brushwork varies according to the image being created: blended mixtures for clear water, choppy aggregates for reflections, wide, dragged horizontals for boat hulls, streaky verticals for masts, finely bunched diagonals and swirls for foliage, curved and irregular dabs for clouds. These different marks are also of varied thickness. The smoother ones for sky and water are so thin as to have negligible substance, but the boats, trees, clouds, and multicolored reflections have substantial impasto. In front of the original painting... the viewer unconsciously lets the thicker strokes confer a fictitious "reality" on their images, compared to the insubstantiality of water and sky. Before Impressionism, painters had varied the direction and texture of their brushwork according to the images they defined, but for Monet these manipulations... were even more vital, because he had renounced the traditional underpinnings of modeling in light and dark. ...[T]he representation of leisure was the result of hard work."
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Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1988) p. 244-245.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Claude_Monet
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Claude Monet
Oscar-Claude Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a French painter, and a leading artist in the French Impressionist art movement. Impressionism expresses one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" was derived from the title of Monet's painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative
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