Impressionism

Lesson 1: Origins of Impressionism

Optional Activities

Here are two activities that you may wish to do. The goal of these is to help you understand further the information you learned in Lesson 1.

Assignment 1 Go to the Web site for the Louvre in Paris at http://www.louvre.fr/louvrea.htm Click on "Collections", then "Paintings", then "Selected Works" and finally "18th" and "19th century France". Now find each of the paintings shown below and identify the name of the artist who painted them.

Find out more about each of these Classical artists in your text and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. at http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/fr...

Assignment 2 If you have access to a still camera or video go out and find a piece of natural forest with lots of deciduous trees with a few evergreens and large rocks and take some pictures of settings like those painted by the Barbizon School artists. After you've developed the pictures, scan them into your computer and then use a photo editing program to apply various special effects, such as "watercolor" or "posterize." You can create a simulated Fontainebleau picture not all that disimilar (at least in outward appearance) to some of the paintings done by the early impressionists.

Here's a picture that I took of the Fountainebleau Forest and then modified in a photo editing program.

You can also visit my web page to view several more of my paintings of the Forest of Fontainebleau. Check out http://www.greggsimpson.com/gallery/Pays...