Camille Pissarro - L'Île Lacroix, Rouen (The Effect of Fog)
While this is a painting that examines through its mark-making technique, the diffusing effect of light through fog, a kind of optical enquiry if you like, it also speaks about stillness, transience and a felt opposition to time’s inexorability.
It pictures the Île Lacroix in Rouen, a section of the river Seine that was industrial rather than obviously picturesque. This spot lies just a ten-minute walk from the city’s famous Cathédrale Notre Dame, the masterpiece of gothic architecture whose façade so entranced Monet and which he painted obsessively. Although both artists were interested in capturing light effects, their choice of subject in this instance could hardly be more different. Pissarro, was of a benign leftist-anarchist outlook and was therefore temperamentally inclined to eschew anything overtly grandiose in his art. He became known as the radical father of impressionism not just because of revolutionary technique and his ways of representing light and colour that he shared with the younger artist, but because he championed the portrayal of the ordinary. This might be peasants toiling in the fields, depicted unsentimentally, or paintings of humble, unremarkable houses in a rural landscape or as here, a river location that the rapid industrialisation of France in the nineteenth century had rendered somewhat unlovely. And yet, Pissarro sees in it a beauty that repudiates the obviously scenic. Not for him the majesty and grandiloquence of epic structures like cathedrals, nor even the artful knowingness of a series of time-lapsed haystack views. Here it feels like the artist wants instead to witness the democratizing, stilled particularity of water, both vaporous and liquid, and the pervasiveness of light, air, smoke and soot. In other words, it is a painting of suspension, in both senses – the suspension of aeriform water droplets and particulates in a nebulous advection fog and a corresponding suspension of time. The river’s ever-flowing progress transforms itself into an infinity of immutability as it touches the faint blue horizon line and the fathomless sky’s ungraspable murk above. The fog makes distance and proximity become as one, a sort of time-space continuum avant la lettre.
The factory on the right and the vessels beside it are darkly silhouetted by the suggestion of golden sunlight just right of centre at the top of the work, as it struggles to penetrate the haze. The chimney spews a Turneresque fantail of smuts, like a firework in negative, its dissemination postponed in the breeze-less air. The blocky geometry of the building and its smokestack gesture at the besmirchment of manufacturing’s own ceaseless output. Some spots of sunlight have made it through the fumes as if to suggest live evanescent fiery particles in it. Similarly, the body of the factory hums with the iridescence of cobalt teal and cadmium orange; it becomes like a miniature work of abstract patterned stained glass. The verticals of the towering flue and the barge funnels are reflected wobblingly on the water’s surface and mirror the dilapidated sheet piles that stand sentinel along the opposite bank.
Pissarro had befriended Paul Signac and George Seurat a few years prior to the making of this painting, and he clearly borrowed from their pointillism method at the time only to move away from it again later, feeling that its painstaking mark-making too time-consuming, too rigidly formulaic and inimical to the spontaneity he preferred. Although this work does show very carefully applied brush strokes whose adjacencies demonstrate the pointillist’s quasi-scientific approach to colour modality, to me it remains truer to Pissarro’s original unforced impressionist sensibility, even if its dots are applied in a way that seems to encode the complex idea of the simultaneous elapse and collapse of time in their making.
As T.J. Clark observed, Pissarro’s paintings are ‘unemphatic’. What we see is the fog’s effacement of landscape features. It is as if time and weather are conspiring to undo what man and nature have made. In the left foreground, we see another black barge with two figures standing on its deck, close enough to be visible in the brume. Meanwhile, in the middle of the river lies what might be a small fishing vessel with a lonely figure on board. Away from the security of the dockside, a desolate oblivion threatens to engulf him. It feels like he will soon be lost from view. The artist in making this painting interrogates a profound and strange paradox - he is making immateriality out of material – paint.
The effect of fog is also to render the familiar unfamiliar and again, underlying this notion is the plain fact that paint does not share the physical properties of the things it depicts. While oil pigment may have a viscose liquid quality, it doesn’t appear or behave like river water, still less like air or smoke or barges come to that. What interests the artist I think, is the way in which fog makes an outlandish flux of matter in whatever physical state it exists, as gas, solid or liquid so that things in the real world are brought closer to the attributes of his oil medium, rather than the other way round, him making paint imitate the world.
The painting also feels as if it is grappling with the idea of impenetrability. Although things remain visible to an extent, fog has made them more difficult to fix and make sense of in the mind’s eye. It amplifies what remains true even when it (fog) isn’t present: the fundamental unknowability of people and places other than as manifestations of light and colour. What is going on in the factory to warrant so much sooty exhaust? What are the two men on the left up to? The isolated Stygian figure in the distance may be fishing, but he may be just as likely be a pilot or a ferryman. Mystery and incomprehension inhere normal life, but fog makes everything even more obscure, dense, opaque. Our viewpoint is elevated and yet the fog impedes omniscience. As viewers, we are less like hawk-eyed observers and more like purblind fumblers for meaning.
Although this painting pictures things in the world which are tangible – a factory, barges, people, an island in the river – the transformative effect of fog is to see in such quotidian stuff a non-religious immanence. By this I mean that Pissarro finds grace and beauty existing inherently in things or landscapes and a realisation that sometimes it takes an accident of weather to reveal these qualities. There is an irony to this – the more things retreat from visibility the easier it becomes to see their intrinsic timeless presence and ubiety. Visual attenuation provokes more rather than less appreciation of ontology, of thingness and tangibility but which is also recognised through very insubstantial marks on canvas.
I also feel some sadness in this work, an understanding of ephemerality. The fog will clear at some point, and water, sky, buildings and people will reassert themselves; their existence will become sharp-edged and insistent. A parenthetical moment of preternaturally muffled serenity will eventually give way to workaday activity and noise. But for now, we can enjoy the quiet and the provisional illusion of deathlessness.
In one regard, this painting seems to posit an opposition between the dark and hard shapes of commerce and industry and the pearlescent flux of air, water and fog. But I think it speaks more to a sense of the world’s ambiguity and to art’s ability to act as the mysterious interface between apparent incompatibilities and to become the agent of their aesthetic integration.
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