Enduring Impressions

Enduring Impressions: Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Their Printmaker George William Thornley

Longmont Museum

400 Quail Road, Longmont, CO 80501

January 29-July 18, 2021

Admission: $8 for adults, $5 for students and seniors, second Saturdays free

Review by Emily Zeek

While impressionism started out as an urban practice, many male artists of the late 19th century with the privilege and means of mobility moved into provincial locations to focus on the unique light and landscapes there. Claude Monet left Paris for Giverny where he concentrated on water lilies, among other things. Vincent Van Gogh moved to Saint Remy and Arles in the south of France, and Auvers-sur-Oise in the north, painting scenes in these areas and pioneering a hybrid style that drew on far East techniques.

When I travelled to the south of France many years ago, I was struck by just how provincial and ordinary these locations really are. The artists’ perspectives imbue the landscape with a sense of mysticism and magical qualities. And as filters of reality, sometimes an artist’s own psychological experience can eclipse what exists. But that’s what’s so fun about art, non?

One male artist, however, featured in the current exhibition at the Longmont Museum, George William Thornley, subverted this dynamic, seeking to be an imperceptible filter for art by using the repetitive facsimile process of lithography. Unlike Van Gogh’s unmistakable stamp on the wheat fields of the south of France, Thornley’s artistry is in being invisible.

A view of the exhibition Enduring Impressions: Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Their Printmaker George William Thornley at the Longmont Museum. Image by Emily Zeek.

George William Thornley was born in the French region of Val-de-Marne. He showed his first watercolor in the Salon of 1878 in Paris and, in addition to lithography, is known for his paintings of seaside and maritime subjects.

Credited in nearly every work of art in the exhibit, he quite literally channels the skill, style, and original perspectives of three undeniable modernist masters— Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro—through the lithographic process. While Van Gogh’s work is not included in this exhibition, his brother Theo Van Gogh commissioned the set of lithographic prints done by Thornley of Degas’ dancers that ultimately led to the other successful collaborations with Pissarro and Monet.

The entrance to the Enduring Impressions exhibition at the Longmont Museum is situated next to the anthropological exhibit Front Range Rising. Image by Emily Zeek.

As you enter the gallery, an anthropological display on the Front Range complements the rotating exhibition titled Enduring Impressions: Degas, Monet, Pissarro, and Their Printmaker George William Thornley linking the regionalist subtext of the exhibition to the unique history of the Front Range. The banks of windows in the foyer that leads to the exhibition hall highlight the connection as well. Colorado scenery is etched into the glass opposite a courtyard, which reveals the barnlike architecture of the Longmont Museum.

Perhaps like me you’ve noticed an air of sophistication and prestige emanating from the Front Range when it comes to the practice and appreciation of art. The striking landscape suggests a certain artistic sensibility and the community has been nurturing and growing this budding elitism. Previously more of an agricultural destination, Longmont, Colorado, in particular, has cultivated a maturing artistic consciousness.

Claude Monet and William Thornley, Haystacks, c. 1894, lithograph. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the Longmont Museum.

Claude Monet first left Paris for the suburb of Giverny in 1883. Almost identical to Longmont’s location in relation to Denver, Giverny sits about 45 miles north-northwest of the Parisian urban center. It was during this time that Monet created many of the works in this exhibition.

Lithography was developed as a system to copy scripts, but over time it was perfected as a process for artistic prints that is still used today. A word with Greek roots, “lithos” means “stone” and “graphy” comes from “graphein,” meaning “to write.” Typically limestone is used as the “stone,” which is ground into a glass-like surface. Upon this the artist applies a greasy ink that repels water in order to create images that are then transferred to paper to make prints.

Camille Pissarro & William Thornley, Portrait of F.C.P., c. 1895, lithograph. Photo by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the Longmont Museum.

Camille Pissarro dabbled in printmaking on his own, but the works in the Enduring Impressions exhibition were collaborations with Thornley. A critical success but commercial flop in their time, the ensuing legal battles required Thornley to reimburse Pissarro for the loss. The subject matter in the collection by Pissarro is diverse, ranging from rural haystacks to urban street scenes of Paris to portraiture.

Edgar Degas & William Thornley, Small Dancer, c. 1889, lithograph. Image by Wes Magyar, courtesy of the Longmont Museum.

Artist Stephanie Jordan views Small Dancer (Edgar Degas & William Thornley, c. 1889, lithograph) at the Enduring Impressions exhibition at the Longmont Museum. Image by Emily Zeek.

Edgar Degas was a radical in how he conceptualized graceful ballerinas as working class, with movements that are transitory and fleeting. When I visited the exhibit, I was accompanied by fellow CU Denver student and artist Stephanie Jordan, who incidentally is a trained dancer. She was drawn to how Degas depicted the ballet dancers, pointing out “I noticed the way they are drawn shows small groupings practicing and in transition stages. It speaks to the concepts the impressionists were exploring with movement and in-between space.”

Lithography: Artistry and Process, also on view at the Longmont Museum, displays the lithographic process and materials. Image by Emily Zeek.

This exhibition gives the lithographs a serious treatment with a beautiful display, though perspectives from outside of the canon of white male masters are missing. Perhaps this is a limitation of the source—all of the works come from the collection of Tobia and Morton Mower. It is not stated whether the Mower collection includes any prints by the impressionist artist Mary Cassatt, for instance, who also successfully experimented with lithography.

However, as a moment in art history, the exhibition captures a period in 19th century France when avant garde artists were shedding the restrictions imposed by the prevailing social order, including the propagandistic history paintings of the court of Louis Quatorze and the period of Napoleonic imperialistic revival that followed. Starting in the mid-19th century, realist artists like Gustave Courbet, Eduard Manet, and the political cartoonist Honoré Daumier began actively chipping away at this constricting monopoly on thought and artistry; impressionists arguably followed in their footsteps.

In fact, it was the lithographic process showcased in this exhibition that enabled political art of the time to be so widely circulated. And as such, Enduring Impressions strikes a satisfying balance between a realist exploration into everyday life and the processes that lent themselves to both mass production and the emerging impressionist movement that was quite literally changing the vision of art as we know it through experimentation.

Emily Zeek is a transmedia and social practice artist from Littleton, Colorado who works with themes of feminism, sustainability, and anti-capitalism. She has a BFA in Transmedia Sculpture from the University of Colorado Denver and a BS in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines.