The Science Behind Monet's Color
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2024
- During three trips to London at the turn of the 20th century, Claude Monet painted more than 40 versions of a single scene: the Waterloo Bridge over the Thames River. Monet’s main subject was not the bridge itself, however; he was most captivated by the landscape and atmosphere of the scene, with its transitory light, fog, and mist.
Eight paintings from this series of London fogs are the centerpiece of the Memorial Art Gallery’s exhibition “Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process.” A recognized master of landscape painting, Monet was an integral founder of the Impressionist movement, which embraced the philosophy of expressing the fleeting sensory effects in a scene.
But how does Monet depict the same scene at different times of day and in various conditions? And how does a viewer see an artist’s brushstrokes of color as a cohesive image, and vastly different colors as the same bridge?
With each of the paintings in the series, Monet manipulates viewer perception in a way that scientists at the time did not completely understand. Today, research such as that conducted at the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science, founded in 1963, provides insight into the complexity of the visual system, illuminating Monet’s processes and the intricacies of his work.
The Memorial Art Gallery partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Worcester Art Museum to analyze the pigments of color Monet used in his Waterloo Bridges series. They found that Monet used a very limited color palette in his Waterloo Bridge series, but was still able to evoke a wide range of ambiances. How did he do this?
The answer involves how our eyes take in wavelengths of light, which our brains interpret, says David Williams, professor of optics at Rochester and the director of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science. In the retina of the eye, there are three types of cones: blue, which is sensitive to short wavelengths of light; green, which is medium-wavelength sensitive; and red, which is long-wavelength sensitive. Each type of cone either reflects or absorbs the various wavelengths of light. These trichromatic signals “are very simple, yet the million shades of color that we experience are derived from just those three,” says Williams, who, in the 1990s, was the first person to image all three kinds of cones in a living human retina and identify how the cones are arranged.
From the retina, signals travel along the optic nerve to the visual cortex, one of the most primitive areas in the back of the brain. Signals are then transmitted back and forth between the visual cortex and other higher-level parts of the brain, including those involved in attention, memory, experience, and biases. The brain’s job is to integrate sensory information from the eyes into pieces-lines, shapes, and depth-and construct them into objects and scenes.
The illumination of an object, for example, can alter perception. That’s because what arrives at our eyes when viewing an object is a combination of both the illumination falling on the object and the intrinsic properties of the object itself, Williams says. “Your brain has a real challenge, which is to figure out what is true about this object even though what arrives at your eye is radically different depending on how it is illuminated.”
When you take an object like a white sheet of paper, it will always be intrinsically white-a phenomenon known as color constancy. If you put the paper outside, it will still be white in the morning light, in the middle of the day, and when the sun goes down, although “if we were to make objective measurements of the light entering your eye in those various circumstances, they would be very different,” he says.
The Waterloo Bridge itself never changes color, but Monet paints it using color in different luminance (brightness), value (a color’s relative lightness or darkness), and intensity (a color’s saturation) to depict sunrise, direct sunlight, and dusk. The brain is able to take in the illumination washing over the entire scene, integrate information, and make inferences. If objects have a bluish cast, for instance, the brain is able to infer that it is most likely daytime. If objects have a reddish cast, the brain infers that sunset is most likely approaching, Williams says. Ultimately, “Monet was highlighting how different an object can be, depending on how it is illuminated. But any normally sited person looking at this series will know: the bridge is gray brick, no matter what time of day it is.”
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Must have been an utter joy to be a part of that exhibition.
The painting in the thumbnail for the video is the one I got engaged in front of! Such a great memory 🥰
So special. Thank you for your perception of his work.
So incredibly inspiring. thank you
I believe Monet was quite inspired by the works of Turner.
if i could be around and talk to anyone on this planet, it would be monet.
😅 to talk to after life? I mean, hes dead already.
đẹp, hiện đại ❤
monet painted in a UV rich pallette because he had the retina of one eye removed...
he could in fact see more colors than someone who has both retinas intact, which is a fairly well documented phenomenon.
how did your team of incredibly talented people overlook this?
@David de Brequet well most if no all "artist" and mind the quotes, know nothing or disregard science completely.
yet here we are figuring things out you cant possibly have the knowledge to differentiate. im a quite succesful gallerist and artist too
@David de Brequet when you say "see as artists do" you think youre like monet and no artist is a clone of one another. monet saw like monet. "you see like you"
Monet's surgery occurred two decades after he painted the London pictures....we definitely consider all of this in preparing the exhibition. Please see this interesting article: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4408507/
Monet utilized full-color seeing which is the way that traditional impressionists painted. Henry Hensche and his methods are probably the closest we have to Monet's techniques. Paintings are built up in layers as Monet would have done.
There are three good books on full-color seeing. One is by Susan Sarback and two are by Lois Griffel (Cape Cod School of Art).
I learned to see color by using Hensche's techniques. There really are blues in grass and violets in a tree trunk as well as a multitude of other colors.
There isn't anything scientific about how Monet painted. He and the other impressionists did not use Chevreul's techniques of complements to dull colors and so on. They painted the colors they saw. Monet, et al., likely did finish their works in the studio. But they had trained their memory.
That wasn’t until the last 5 years of his life though. He did most of his paintings before then. He had a lot of trouble painting toward the end of his life and struggled to get through his lilly paintings.
A load of talk that ultimately said nothing.
That’s exactly what people say when they aren’t smart enough to get it.
@@kaymuldoon3575 Ah, thanks for that. I always suspected that I was stupid, thanks for confirming my suspicions.
@@kaymuldoon3575 elitism is blinding
I bet in a hundred years or so we are gonna find out that all these x-ray cameras we used on all these famous paintings well i bet that the rafiation does something terrible to them
No relation between abstract art and the works of Monet, you aren't in the same League. Monet would laugh at and pity you.
Peso made them all right to kill me
I really am tired of the snobbery of the hosts egos
hear ya. But maybe consider that they are passionate curators of some complex knowledge- between history / contexting to sharing significance Lastly it takes a next level skill to explain to info yo newbies to amateurs to professionals.