Before Monet, There Was Maalima: Walta Bryce Rewrites the Brushstrokes of History
by Ianthe Small
In what is certain to either ignite a fierce academic feud or force the Musée d’Orsay to reprint several thousand wall labels, art historian Walta Bryce is preparing to release her most ambitious (and, some say, impish) work to date: Baltic Light: The Hidden Origins of Impressionism. In it, she makes a case so dazzling and audacious that one almost forgets to check the footnotes. Her thesis? That French Impressionism was not, in fact, born on the banks of the Seine, but in the lilac-scented meadows and long twilights of 19th-century Estonia.
Before you scoff (as, admittedly, I did), consider this: what if Monet’s famously flickering waterlilies owe their very shimmer to the boggy reflections painted thirty years earlier by obscure Estonian artist Kaarel Maalima? What if Pissarro’s pastoral scenes were essentially well-funded echoes of landscapes already pioneered by Anu Kask, whose brushwork, according to Bryce, “makes Sisley look like a man painting with a sponge in a storm”?
Bryce, long admired for her scholarship on overlooked Baltic movements, has built a reputation for finding big narratives in forgotten places. In Baltic Light, she suggests that the aesthetic DNA of Impressionism—its palette, spontaneity, and obsessive study of fleeting natural light—first bloomed not in Paris, but in what was then the Governorate of Estonia, under Russian Imperial rule and persistent drizzle.
“I’m not saying Monet stole Estonian Impressionism,” Bryce insists in her typically crisp prose. “I’m saying he encountered it, adapted it, and then let the Parisian critics declare it new. Meanwhile, Estonian artists were too busy drying their linen canvases near the samovar to file international patents.”
Chapter two is a particular highlight: “Maalima and Monet: Parallel Visions, Uneven Fame,” which includes side-by-side reproductions of Monet’s Haystacks and Maalima’s earlier Põllukuhjad at Dusk—the resemblance is uncanny. The brushwork, the handling of mist, even the gently absurd decision to paint the same thing fifteen times under slightly different weather conditions all suggest that someone was reading someone else’s exhibition catalogue.
Bryce also unearths letters (previously untranslated from Old Estonian cursive) in which Kask describes her “rapid method of capturing snow without painting snow,” a technique strikingly similar to what Monet would later call “the effect of light upon whiteness.” Coincidence? Bryce archly leaves the reader to decide, though her footnotes carry the distinct tone of an eyebrow raised in victory.
What elevates the book above a simple nationalistic reclamation project is its wit. Bryce writes with the amused detachment of a scholar who has endured decades of departmental pushback and survived them by becoming more erudite and more entertaining. Her aside on Degas—“the only Impressionist allergic to the outdoors”—is worth the price of admission alone.
The final chapters, dedicated to why Estonian Impressionism failed to achieve international renown, are sobering. She cites a lack of galleries, limited transport links, and the Estonian temperament—“too modest to declare themselves geniuses, too busy chopping firewood to market a movement.”
Still, the legacy, Bryce argues, remains. In the luminous glints of morning dew on birch leaves, in the refusal to polish a painting into submission, in the idea that the act of seeing is itself worthy of art—Estonia was not following Paris. It was leading, quietly.
Baltic Light: The Hidden Origins of Impressionism is expected to provoke controversy, admiration, and at least one exhibition in Tartu. As Bryce concludes with typical understatement: “History is not written by the victors. It is written by the French. But every now and then, the light falls somewhere else first.”
Am I persuaded? No, not at all. But it is an interesting read, even if ultimately it proves us persuasive.