Monet’s Impression-Sunrise and Cassatt’s Young Mother, Essay Example

Examining the specific features that are vivid within the painting reveals a painter’s style. Claude Monet’s Impression-Sunrise 1872 depicts very crucial elements of his artistic style. One of the most evident characteristics is the awareness of color harmony. This particularly has the effect of enforcing the viewers’ attention (Therese). This is evident in the manner in which he manages to capture the atmospheric effects of the sunrise. This characteristic is evident in his works during the late 60s and early 70s. In order to achieve this, Monet employed heightened color complemented with broken brushwork. The particular landscape of the painting sets the mood, a sombre mood of solitude. This was characteristic of his technique that depicted the feeling of the scene he painted.

In this painting, Monet employs a bold handling of the brush. This entailed the use of short and thick strokes of paint, which was crucial in helping Monet quickly capture the essence of the landscape. The brushstrokes that are vivid in the water creates a sense of rhythm that is particularly associated with the sea. The water and sky portions of the painting depict a distinction application of color where the viewer places colors side by side and optically mixes them.

As evident in most of his work at the time, Monet seeks to achieve ambience of light by mixing the paint pigments with lead white. This is characteristic of all impressionist painters who placed emphasis on natural light. This is evident in the reflection in the water. Monet clearly depicts disregard to the conventional use of space (Monet, Claude; Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art). This is because he employs the use of a horizon with the surface of water. This coincided with his paintings in the early 1900s. He employs a huge canvas that mainly depicts water.

Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother, Daughter, and Son 1913 also depicts numerous aspects of her artistic style. One of the most evident and defining characteristics of Cassatt’s works was the girl’s pose. In her paintings, she shows how a girl’s pose possesses the naturalism of childhood (Barter, Rhodes and Thayer). This is vivid in the pose adopted by the mother and daughter as opposed to that of the son. She highly employs Japanese patterns asymmetric designs as she places the center of the composition, the girl, and off-center.

In this particular painting she uses strong colors and employs energetic brushwork, which defines her link with French impressionism. Her style and the subject matter in this painting is quite similar to that of Edward Manet. This painting has the unique feature of light not dissolving form. Instead, Cassatt ensures all objects retain mass with the light complementing and enhancing the physical presence of each distinct object.

Mary Cassatt employs the Japanese woodcuts as depicted in the simple lines and flat planes in the painting. This produced a general flattening of the space. The expanses of the different hues (blues, yellows and whites flatten the surface of the painting (Barter, Rhodes and Thayer). This has the general effect of visually drawing people into a compact unit. Notably, there is the lack of distant space within the painting. This depicts the heavy Japanese influence in her paintings. She also employs the use of broad abstract geometrical forms as seen in the patterns.

In conclusion, though Monet and Cassatt epitomized impressionist painting, they employed different and unique styles that set their paintings apart.

Works Cited

Barter, Judith A, Kimberly Rhodes and Seth Thayer. American Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago: From Colonial Times to World War I. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1998. Print.

House, John. Impressionism: Paint and Politics. Singapore: John House, 2004. Print.

Monet, Claude; Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art. Claude Monet : masterworks from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Las Vegas: PaperBall, 2004. Print.

Therese, Southgate. “Sunrise (Marine).” The Journal of the American Medical Association 21 (2004): 291. Print.