Impressionist Places

This sumptuous art book offers a unique perspective on the Impressionist achievement, celebrating the magic of the past and revealing its legacy in the reality of the present. In their light-filled landscapes, Impressionist artists created a new way of seeing nature, but what do the places they painted look like one hundred and fifty years on? Inspired by the Barberini Museum’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces, photographer Christoph Irrgang traveled to dozens of European places immortalized in paintings to document the effects of time and modernization on the landscape. Here his photographs are placed side-by-side with gorgeous reproductions of the original paintings—and the results are, in turn, astonishing and illuminating. Readers will discover how artists imbued their settings with a certain aura and how their magic flows into the reality of the present. At Le Havre, where Monet painted the busy port, the efforts of rebuilding after World War II led UNESCO to inscribe it a World Heritage Site. They will travel to the town of Louveciennes, outside Paris, where Renoir painted his gently shaded pathway. Readers will revisit the home of novelist Octave Mirbeau, whose garden Pissarro painted as a riot of color. And they will inspect the concrete and iron railroad bridge in the town of Argenteuil on the Seine, which Caillebotte depicted as a modern landscape where nature mingled harmoniously with industry. In addition to informative texts about each painting and each location, this book features precise GPS coordinates of each site. This fascinating study in the juxtaposition of art and photography of past and present will have readers desperate to travel in the footsteps of the Impressionists.