No, it did not. Let’s settle that right now. Still:

“Scientists confirm long-held theory about what inspired Monet,” went the headline in CNN.

The idea that headline suggests is that with Impressionism painting got all hazy, atmospheric, and blurry because of the advent of air pollution.

Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament in the Fog, oil, 32s36 inches, 1903

An air pollution scientist who saw Impressionistic paintings in Paris initiated the study. “I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler and Monet paintings at Tate in London and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works,” Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University in Paris, told CNN.

 

There’s obvious proof in Monet’s paintings and even his letters that he loved the effects of smoke, fog, and mist, and even that such atmospheric effects fired up his desire want to paint. But to suggest that Impressionism was inspired by smog is misguided.

Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral. Facade (Sunset)}(français : Cathédrale de Rouen. Effet de soleil (Fin de journée), note the French title emphasizes the “effect” of light at sunset. 39×25 inches, 1892

Apparently, the team from Harvard and the Sorbonne analyzed 100 paintings by Monet and Turner with the goal of finding an empirical basis to the hypothesis that the paintings capture increasingly polluted skies during the Industrial Revolution.
To do so, they converted softened (aka “lost”) edges and “increased whiteness” into mathematical representations they could correlate with data on rising air pollution.

 

Sure enough, they found that, “the contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared whiter and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic,” the researcher said. Thus the study found what it was looking for.

It isn’t until the end of most of the news coverage on this that the writers tend to include the “contrary viewpoint,” in this case from the art critic Sebastian Smee, who destroyed the study in the Washington Post. The research confuses “internal creative choices with external stimuli,” Smee said, and that increased pollution cannot explain the artists’ stylistic evolution. For one thing, he pointed out, none of their pictures are straightforward representations of objective reality.

Most artists would agree that the two-part package of originality and inspiration is one thing, and observing and painting the things of one’s time is another. They’re related of course, but not by simple cause and effect.

JMW Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Being Towed to her Final Berth, oil 1839

In other words, Turner would have been Turner had he painted in 1635 instead of 1835. Monet would be Monet if he were painting right now.

Interested in trying your hand at painting Monet’s non-polluted garden? Check out this video by Charles H. White and plant seeds for further inspiration.

A “Metaphor of Plants” Wins February PleinAir Salon
Hui Li, “Metaphor of Plants Series No.8,” oil, 59 x 71 in.

Artist Hui Li has won Overall First Place in the February 2023 PleinAir Salon, judged by Scott Shields, the Ted and Melza Barr Chief Curator and Associate Director at the Crocker Art Museum.

Hui Li on “Metaphor of Plants Series No.8”

“This is one of my paintings series inspired by the ancient land of Australia, where I lived for more than 20 years. It was also inspired by the very personal experience of my awe of Nature.

The landscape I’ve chosen was a farm that one of my friends, Arthur (a Greek immigrant), had been settled in. It was located by the pond and hills of Bathhurst, near the Blue Mountains of Sydney. It’s a place with vast land and varieties of eucalyptus trees and all different sorts of grass, and a scarcity of water resources. The Emergent plant leaning by the pond had instantly caught my attention – I had spent time observing and listening before I recorded and sketched the plant with the surroundings.

This was a later work in comparison to other paintings in the series. In “Metaphor of Plants No. 2” I had painted a pond, and I thought I could consider a more comprehensive picture with grass beside the pond, therefore No.8 came up.”