It wasn't one of my first loves, but I came to love impressionism some time back. It's the artists' interest in rendering their experience of the world (phenomenologically) and their resultant interest in light, form and perception, and it's the way this has frequently beautiful results. To the extent that I'm drawn to their subjects - landscapes, famously - it's because they lend themselves to such treatments and because my own experiences of them arrive similarly in an immediate perceptual sense, making for that always-to-be-cherished sensation of recognition writ large when the same appears in art.
This exhibition is a roll call of big names, centred on the most canonical of the impressionists - Pissarro, who I used to find overly decorative but no longer, Renoir, about whom I'm always a bit ambivalent because of how verging on saccharine he can be but whose paintings' out and out beauty are self-evident, and Monet (especially Monet, in every sense) - and with a proportionately lesser representation of those less in that core stream but still somehow part of it (Cezanne, Degas, even and maybe a bit incongruously a Van Gogh), plus some important early influences and predecessors.
Some of these I saw when visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston what was only three years ago but feels much longer. Then as now, the gathering of Monets was stunning.
Camille Pissarro - 'Two Peasant Women in a Meadow (Le Pre)' (1893)
