This article was written by Lesley Stern
I had an uncanny sense of deja vu when I first laid eyes on Auvers sur Oise thus I could not figure out why it breathed familiarity. I then realized I had been entranced before by much of the scenery, which hung on the walls of major museums and was printed in art history books.
Van Gogh spent his final 90 days, painted 70 canvases and died here in Auvers, however, I did not know that this is where Impressionism was born.
Certainly Impressionism's gestation period occurred in Paris, where artists like Manet, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Degas departed from the academic tradition of studio paintings by using "common" working people in bars, brothels and on the streets as subjects. They scandalized the art world with their freer, fragmented brushstrokes and use of colors that radiated outside the lines of the forms they painted.
With the invention of metal tubes to preserve oil paints and the newly built railroad in the mid 19th century, the Impressionists were able to travel farther afield, starting in Argenteuil, Sannois, Asnires, Gennevillier. They began to take their cues from nature, painting scenes of bathers, groups on picnics and boats on the Seine. Monet's "Impressionism, rising sun" painted in Argenteuil in 1874, baptized the movement, but it took several years to catch on.
At the invitation of Dr. Paul Gachet, an Auvers resident and homeopathic doctor for nervous disorders, with a keen interest in art and engraving, artists traveled to the Val D'Oise region (part of the Il de France) and soon began to settle here.
Corot and Daubigny were the pioneers. Inspired by the beautiful countryside, the rolling hills, the natural light and the way the light and fog vapors played on the Oise river, they began to deviate from the dark posed paintings that were fashionable in Paris salons at the time and painted landscapes. But unlike the Barbizon artists who tended towards romantic realism, they focused on more ordinary things, like green fields, apple trees, peasants and thatched cottages. The exceptional light here created color contrasts and shadings that were originally scoffed at and reviled by the art community.
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