"Purple does something strange to me"
Charles Bukowski
(The People Look Like Flowers at Last, 2007)
To help us understand why the colour purple (also known as violet, lilac, or mauve) was so abundantly used by the Impressionists, let's take a look first at their colours in general.
The Impressionists were "the colourists", meaning they favoured colour over lines. Additionally, colour to them carried more meaning than simply filling in the contours expectedly. With their colours, they stated: This is how I see it, and opened the freedom of expression doors for future artists. And so a hundred years later, we will have Mark Rothko saying: This is how I feel it, using exactly, and only, blocks of colour to express himself.
Unlike any seen in art before, Impressionists' colours were radically brilliant and vivid. Wynford Dewhurst (Impressionist Painting, 1904) explains: "The Impressionists purified the palette, discarding blacks, browns, ochres, and muddy colours generally,… These they replaced by new and brilliant combinations, the result of modern chemical research. Cadmium Pale, Violet de Cobalt, Garance rose doré, enabled them to attain a higher degree of luminosity than was before possible."
Hermitage Garden, Maison Rouge, 1877
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903)
50 x 60 cm, oil on canvas
Private Collection
Intertwined, science and industry transformed every aspect of society in the 19th century, art included, via experimental artists. Two important things happened, making it possible for the Impressionists to become revolutionary colourists: Michel Chevreul's Theory of Colours (he discovered that complementary colours, from the opposite sides of the wheel, put next to each other, enhance each other) and the Industrial production of synthetic dyes.
Fun fact: Chevreul is one of the 72 scientists, engineers, mathematicians, whose names Eiffel engraved on the Eiffel Tower for the 1889 opening. Anticipating attacks from groups that found it ugly, Eiffel decided to 'armour' the tower with the names of prominent inventors since the French Revolution. Even funnier fact: Impressionists, although they approved of the Eiffel Tower and saw it as a symbol of progress and modernity, never actually painted it!
Pissarro (painting above), being "The first Impressionist", as Cezanne called him, was leading the way in embracing and implementing complementary colours contrast and harmony theory. He even framed his bright, yellow-bathed paintings in purple frames! Cezanne, in his 10-year Impressionist period, learned about colour from Pissarro, proudly presenting himself as "Cézanne the pupil of Pissarro".
Cliff Walk at Pourville, 1882
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
66.5 x 82.3 cm, oil on canvas
This breezy Monet painting is the one I chose to do a colour analysis for an Oxford course. Here is a brief version of it:
For The Cliff Walk, Monet used bright hues of blue, green and yellow with touches of purple, pink, and orange. The shadowed areas (the dark sides of the cliff) have the same blue, green, and purple hues as the upper side of the cliff, but without the touches of yellow, white and pink. The sky is painted with translucent, thin and almost transparent layers, while the rest of the painting is done with opaque, thick ones. Emphasising the focus, the paint texture is most visible on the human figures and the umbrella. The lightest tone of the sea and the darkest tones of the cliff meet in the middle, creating a dramatic vertical. The effect of wind in the moving thick grass is achieved by short, curved brushstrokes of complementary colours put next to each other - blue next to yellow and orange next to green.
There it was, the fundamentally different way of painting, using brush and hand movements, textures and colour thickness to achieve the desired effect. For the first time, artists are letting us see the process and the method. The irrevocable democratisation of art. The viewer is invited to engage. Modern art is born.
Waterloo Bridge in London, 1902
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
65.7 x 100.5 cm, oil on canvas
The House of Parliament, Seagulls, 1903
Claude Monet (1840-1926)
81 x 92 cm, oil on canvas
Now, about that "Purple Mania". The major reason for it was that Purple or Mauveine was the first synthetic dye to be developed in 1856 (UK). Then came the invention of cobalt violet in 1859 (France) and manganese violet in 1868 (Germany). With mass industrial production, artists gained access to a stable, long-lasting colour, packed in portable tubes for the first time. First, there was purple, and then over 2,000 synthetic dyes by 1913.
Before the mid-19th century, according to one study, purple could be found in only 0.06% of the 140,000 artworks examined (The World According to Colour, James Fox from Allen Tager's article). Artists avoided it as it aged badly, and therefore wasn't worth mixing pure blue and red for it.
Monet had an additional advantage: his brother Leon had worked in the Swiss synthetic dye company Geigy since 1872 and gave Monet a tour of the factory near Roen. While in London, Monet painted a series (examples above) of the Waterloo Bridge (15 paintings) and The Houses of Parliament (19 paintings), all of which were studies and variations of light and purple colour discreetly interrupted by the architecture. At the time, critics called his London paintings - 'purple smears"! They were right in the sense that Monet basically painted the heavily polluted fog and smog over London.
L'Hortensia, 1894
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
73,1 x 60,4 cm, oil on canvas
Paule Gobillard Painting, 1887
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
86 x 94 cm, oil on canvas
Après le Déjeuner (After Lunch), 1881
81 x 100 cm, oil on canvas
Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)
Now stable and affordable, purple synthetic dye bled from canvases into shops, ballrooms and households. It was known that this colour was the favourite of Empress Eugenie, often called the "Empress of fashion". Her reign ended in 1870, right at the time when purple dye became widely available. Ladies were crazy about it; finally, the middle classes could wear the 'royal' colour!
Art critics despised synthetic paints, especially those with a purple hue. They saw it as disrespectful to naturalism, a degradation and a real madness or mania. Many of the attacks came from journalists inexperienced in looking at colour in paintings, and instead focused on the narrative or metaphors. They thought of themselves as witty while writing things as "coloured wool" (Bertall on Monet, Thomson p.190) or "the tub of soapy water in which the Batignolles school drowns everything indiscriminately..."(Baron Schop on Impressionists, Thomson p.191)
Danseuses aux jupes violettes, bras leves
(Dancers in violet robes, raised hands), 1895-98
Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
90 x 53 cm, pastel
More than anything, purple paint was a statement for the Impressionists. It was a torch they carried in the battle against conformity, tradition, dusty rules and uniformity. To critics' annoyance, for the Impressionists, the subject was of very little importance ("He didn't allow things time to take hold of him", Bonnard on Monet, Thomson p. 220). The depiction of a sensation created by the play of colour and light was the only relevant goal.
"Not allowing things to take hold of him" could also be a perfect phrase for Rothko's work. Here is the non-denominational chapel he created in Houston, Texas. A place "welcoming all religions and belonging to none". A place for praying, meditating, and thinking.
Looking at light moving over time across purple panels, to me, is as fine a closing as any to this 100 Years of Purple and Art Story.
Mark Rothko Chapel Photo
Sources:
Books: Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development, by Wynford Dewhurst, Project Gutenberg eBook, The World According to Colour: A Cultural History (2021) by James Fox; Impressionism, Origins, Practice, Reception by Belinda Thomson
