Edited, Annotated, and Introduced by Sarah Hilton of Pimlico Wilde, from the copy discovered by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, Antiquarian Bookseller
Editor’s Introduction
The review reproduced below, originally published in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts et Autres Déplaisirs (Paris, May 1874), represents one of the earliest surviving accounts of the group later canonised as the “Impressionists.” Its author, Archibald Plimpton-Smythe (1842,1901), was a London-born critic who spent his middle years haunting Paris cafés, where he was tolerated primarily because he always paid his monthly absinthe bill, something that was very rare indeed.
Plimpton-Smythe’s writings had been considered lost until the chance discovery of a bound volume of his clippings by Mr. Leonard Forsythe, a dealer in books. Forsythe, a man of great discretion but limited patience, sold the work to Pimlico Wilde in 2024.
Here, then, is his review, which you will find unabridged, unrepentant, and unforgettable. Readers are cautioned: Plimpton-Smythe does not merely dislike the Impressionists. He loathes them with a gusto rarely witnessed outside of opera villains.
“A Calamity in Pigment”
By Archibald Plimpton-Smythe
It falls to me, with sorrow bordering upon nausea, to recount the so-called Exhibition of the Impressionists, lately convened at the premises of the photographer M. Nadar.¹
What one encounters within is not art but delinquency with brushes. The exhibitors, a rogue’s gallery including Messrs. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, and the demoiselle Morisot, seem united only in their determination to assassinate beauty.
M. Monet: Fog as Philosophy
M. Monet presents a painting entitled Impression, Sunrise.² The effect is as if one had rubbed one’s eyes too vigorously after chopping onions. A lurid orange yolk floats amidst grey vapours, the harbour dissolving into a soup of soot. It is less a seascape than a crime committed upon linen.³
M. Renoir: The Grocer of Flesh
M. Renoir offers portraits of women so alarmingly pink they seem constructed entirely from rashers of bacon.⁴ His nudes glisten not with allure but with grease; their very limbs appear basted. Should a portraitist render my own dear aunt in such fashion, she would have fainted. And then, on coming round, she would, quite rightly, have demanded the painter’s arrest.
M. Degas: Clerk to the Ballet
M. Degas concerns himself with dancers. Yet he observes them not with sympathy, but with the accounting eye of a clerk tallying boots. His ballerinas stoop, stretch, scratch, and scowl; never once do they enchant. The viewer leaves with the distinct impression that the Paris Opéra is staffed entirely by poultry with sore joints.
M. Cézanne: Fruit in Revolt
M. Cézanne paints apples that might as well be cannonballs, pears that might sink ships, and landscapes that appear composed from geological refuse.⁵ One may admire his perseverance, but that admiration ceases upon contact with his canvases, which resist all human sympathy, much like granite itself.
M. Pissarro: Mud as Muse
M. Pissarro devotes himself to peasants knee-deep in fields of indistinct brown. It is possible he intends social commentary, but the only commentary I perceived was mud, mud, and more mud. One imagines he paints not with oils but with chimney sweepings.
M. Sisley: The Drowner
M. Sisley specialises in rivers. Alas, each resembles a laundry vat tipped over onto the canvas. His skies are perpetually damp, his banks perpetually sodden. To look at a Sisley is to feel one’s boots filling with water.
Mlle. Morisot: The Mistress of Smudges
As for Mlle. Morisot, her portraits melt before one’s gaze. Faces dissolve into wallpaper, hands evaporate into the furniture. It is as if she begins each work, then grows weary, and sets down her brush halfway through. One leaves less with a portrait than with a vague suspicion of having glimpsed someone while sneezing.
The Collective Outrage
This “Impressionist” exhibition, so loudly trumpeted by its adherents, amounts to a conspiracy against form, clarity, and civilisation itself. To call it painting is to flatter it. It is a riot of half-thoughts and botched attempts , the visual equivalent of a dinner guest speaking only in hiccups.
If France persists in indulging such daubers, then the Louvre may as well be cleared at once, and its noble halls converted into laundries, slaughterhouses, or mud-stores, so that the public may be properly prepared for what awaits them.
Editor’s Footnotes
¹ Nadar’s photographic studio was, indeed, the site of the 1874 exhibition. Plimpton-Smythe, who despised photography nearly as much as painting, regarded this as a double insult.
² This is the very canvas , Impression, Sunrise , from which the term “Impressionism” derives. Plimpton-Smythe’s comparison to onions is, of course, unique to him.
³ Scholars may note his phrase “crime committed upon linen” anticipates the later Dadaist notion of art-as-vandalism, albeit without any of the wit.
⁴ Renoir’s flesh tones were, in fact, a frequent subject of contemporary mockery, though few other critics likened them so bluntly to rashers.
⁵ Cézanne’s apples are now considered foundational to modern art. Plimpton-Smythe, however, preferred fruit to be edible.
Editor’s Afterword
When Mr. Forsythe sold us this volume, he muttered: “I fear it is rather anti-Impressionist.” Rather? It is the textual equivalent of artillery fire. And yet, one must cherish it. To be wrong in such style, such extravagant fury, is a form of art in itself.
Plimpton-Smythe failed entirely to recognise genius. But in failing so colourfully, he bequeathed us a different kind of masterpiece: criticism as theatre, dislike elevated into performance.
Long may he glower across the centuries.
