If there is a pictorial style influenced by the scientific method, that style is impressionism. But let’s go in parts, or better, in moments. Because at first, the pictorial term “impressionism” was born to resignify itself, that is, to contradict a mocking article written by the critic Louis Leroy in April 1874 in the satirical newspaper The Charivariand titled: The Impressionist Exhibition. It was a mocking piece that ridiculed the exhibition that took place at the independent artists’ salon in Paris, where, among many other works, the painting by Claude Monet titled Print, rising sun.
Turning the meaning of the term coined by Leroy, Impressionism came to define a pictorial style where the vibration of light on bodies was experimented with using discontinuous brushstrokes; a technique that, some time later, in the 20th century, would be called “gestalt brushstroke”, alluding to Gestalt psychology, a current of modern psychology born to scientifically demonstrate that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” , which applied to impressionist pictorial art demonstrates that colorful spots, dispersed in appearance, are perceived by our brain in a unitary way. In this way, the painting of the Impressionists, with their short and exhausted-looking strokes, would open the door to pointillism, a pictorial technique worked with points that, seen from a certain distance, define bodies and landscapes.
However, Impressionism would not have existed without the precise moment that led the American John Goffe Rand to invent the tin tube with a screw cap, which revolutionized the world of painting and strengthened the Impressionist movement. John Goffe Rand patented it in 1841 and, until then, if a painter went out with his belongings to paint outdoors, he carried his pigments in pig bladders. Therefore, the fact of preserving paint in tubes that kept the colors alive until they were finished was a stimulus for painters like Monet, the artist who gave his name to a style without intending to; One fine day he left his studio ready to capture the light that reflected in the waters of the port of Le Havre as dawn rose over the ships. The rest is a matter of chance and the bad judgment of a painter involved in pictorial criticism.
But if there is a scientific figure who contributed to the study of colors and their perception, that figure was that of the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) who published an essential work for the impressionist painters entitled: Manual of physiological optics, where he stated that color is a perception. In this way, a scientific book would become an artistic reference book during the second half of the 19th century.
Hermann von Helmholtz, with his optical discovery by which in our retina we only combine three colors – red, green and blue -, demonstrated that the other colors originate in the brain. This meant a new way of applying pigments; especially to the shadows that were no longer black. Because of these things, pictorial impressionism was closely linked to the scientific field. It was a moment in Europe in which the light of science came to illuminate painting.
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