The Painter as Printmaker: Impressionist Prints from the National Gallery of Canada

September 10 to December 6, 2009

With graphic arts in the spotlight at the Museum this fall, the Museum is hosting the exhibition The Painter as Printmaker: Impressionist Prints from the National Gallery of Canada. This compelling show of seventy superb works on paper explores the range of printmaking techniques employed by the most celebrated French artists of the period spanning Realism and Post-Impressionism, from the mid-1850s through the 1890s.

Among the artists included are Bracquemond, Cassatt, Cézanne, Corot, Daubigny, Degas, Forain, Luce, Manet, Millet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Signac and Van Gogh. Through innovative uses of a variety of techniques, including cliché-verre (a process incorporating photography), etching, lithography, aquatint, drypoint and monotypes, these revolutionary figures sought to capture the stark realities of modern daily life and articulate their fascination with the natural effects of light onto a medium predominantly conceived in black and white. Each artist found a way to assert his individual style and took advantage of these techniques to reach a larger and more diversified market. The artists included prints in their very first group exhibition, in 1874.

By 1876, Paris art critics had recognized that printmaking was intrinsic to the Impressionist aesthetic. The exhibited works, in brilliant impressions, reflect the breadth of these artists’ subjects: portraits, café and urban scenes, bathers, landscapes, genre scenes and figure studies.

John Collins, Assistant Curator, Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Canada, is the curator of the exhibition. Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate Chief Curator and Curator of Old Masters, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is in charge of the presentation of this exhibition in Montreal.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Canada and supported by the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canada Travelling Exhibition Indemnification Program.