They redirect attention to canvases executed for specific interior spaces, as overdoors and decorative panels for dining rooms, salons, galleries, even stairwells, and occasionally as insertions into actual doors. Although he never undertook a mural decoration, Edgar Degas confided to his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, that “it has been my lifelong dream to paint walls.” “Painting is done, is it not, to decorate walls so it should be as rich as possible,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir explained to Albert André as he was completing his last monumental figure painting, The Bathers (1919).īoth books survey a number of decorative cycles, from Paul Cézanne’s early series The Four Seasons (1860–1861) to Claude Monet’s twenty-two glorious panels of Water Lilies (1915–1924). They cover the same terrain, focus on the same works by the same artists, and have the same mission: to document the centrality of decoration-in specific commissions but also more broadly, as a founding principle-in the works of all the Impressionists, with the exception of Alfred Sisley.
Two recent publications offer a dramatically new approach to the history of Impressionism: Marine Kisiel’s La Peinture impressionniste et la décoration and Le Décor impressionniste: aux sources des “Nymphéas, ” edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, the catalog of a superb exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 2022.
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