As you can guess, I flipped through this book during football games.
As a Eyewitness book, it’s a graphically designed, visually oriented work with a number of images surrounding brief text, history, and explanations. Like a lot of these survey course coffee table books, the book covers a lot of ground in the Impressionist movement, a brief history, and a bit of individual information about the artists. It has sections (two page spreads) covering some themes and practices shared by the Impressionists and reasons why they’re considered Impressionists. As survey books, it’s not bad; I also see there are titles in the series that deal with the individual authors as well.
Serious students might think these books are a waste of time, but unserious students like me can pick up some tidbits. Two I did from this book: Renoir was one of the first to prime his canvases (that is, put down a base coat of white or gesso so that colors overlaid on the base coat would pop out more) and that Renoir worked wet-on-wet (I know what that is because Bob Ross did that). So I learned something certain in addition to adding to my familiarity with the works and images.
The book also gives a bunch more depth to the non-painting work, such as the sculptures and the cast bronze of the artists. Some other books shy away from this a bit because the paintings are easier to represent two-dimensionally perhaps.
At any rate, a good book to look at for a bit. I’ll keep my eyes out for others in the Eyewitness Books series on art. I think I have one or two on other topics that I’ll have to move up in my reading queue.
Books mentioned in this review:
