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In her autobiography, Emily Carr writes that European painters were overwhelmed when confronted with the clear air in British Columbia. They could only paint landscapes when the distance was obscured by smoke.

Add this to a British Columbia sub!

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I thought it was just his eyes changing from having cataracts. It's a known fact he had cataracts. You can see the colors shift from cool tones to reds on the water lily paintings.

Yeah right try to paint your cataract effect with a cataract. A bit like composing symphonies when you are deaf. Oh wait ...

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It's true! It's actually really interesting to see the progression in how he viewed the world. Here is a PDF link for more in depth research and a study of his work.

>Monet's art focused on capturing the effects of color and light on the environment. His visual deterioration was probably accelerated by his insistence on outdoor painting. >The works of Claude Monet after 1908, when cataract is definitively and devastatingly installed, heavy predominance of yellow brown vibrant colors and also a clear and continuous process of blurred vision, with blurry, misshapen paintings.
>There is also a clear color change that occurred after the late surgical intervention, with a clear difference in color perception by the artist in both eyes, the operated right eye and the left one, which he refused to operate.
>There is no doubt about his diagnosis, nor that his work eternally portrays the visual effects of untreated cataracts in the elderly parient.

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There's also a theory that the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 created dusty reddish sunsets for years. Impressionism pretty much started around that time.

interesting althoug thats 20 years after manet’s olympia

the haze may be related to the eruption, but its not why the impressionists painted as they did

Didn’t the invention of the camera also play a role? Since accuracy of an image was suddenly made so simple, I heard the impressionists decided to paint how an image felt.

That explanation doesn't really make sense, though. His cataracts would affect his vision of his paint and painting just as much as the landscape, so the painting would look similar to the landscape

In the classic essay The Decay of Lying, (life imitates art) by Oscar Wild, I think he takes the example of smog as one of these; the beauty of smog wasn't there until artists invented it

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Like London Fog was actually coal dust. (I have heard)

I can get my face an inch away from my palette and my canvas, but not the middle if a pond or the top of a tree (without mighty effort) - and that wouldn't help me paint a whole scene, anyway.

although not about “feeling”, thats the best theory; as well - again because of tech advancement - oil paint could be bought in in tubes and cheaply, and was also portable; that and the import of japanese pictures changed how the early moderns thought of pictures and representation too.

you see this these changes in painting again with the advent of radio, film, tv and most recently with the adaptation of handheld flatscreen computers

to paraphrase marshall mcluhan: any new medium creates stress on old mediums to change

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This is not new knowledge. Monet wrote about painting the pollution from the factories in London. He liked how it impacted color

So by your logic, if I'm completely blind, I'm also blind to my equipment, therefore it cancels out and I will paint landscapes with perfect accuracy? This redditor just cured all blindness with facts and logic.

Seeing your paints and gear less clearly would ADD to your problems and DOUBLE the errors and obscurity if anything, not undo your first layer of difficulties.

No need to be snarky.

If cataracts just makes things look blurry then you're right.

If cataracts makes bright colors look dull, for example, then he would still choose paints that match the true colors of the scene. The bright colors in the scene would look dull to him, but his bright colored paints would look exactly as dull.

Sorry, sorry. Anyway yes to a degree, but your dynamic range would be scuffed and you'd still make more mistakes. Like by analogy, if I'm a carpenter and I try to build a set of cabinets with a ruler that only has 1 centimeter markings and no millimeters anymore, they're going to be way shittier and not line up quite right ans not close fully, etc., even though I'm consistently using the same rulers throughout. The lower precision will make the answers float around further from the true mark.

It will always just add more and more errors.

edit: or not an analogy, just the extreme version of this actual issue would be full colorblindness, i.e. grayscale. You could still paint in color but you'd have to guess which color. Partial points along that continuum will be some way in between "the right color" and "guessing"

This study seems to point towards the “dreamy haze” being a progressive symptom of his cataracts, however much coal smoke was across Europe at this time.

I agree he probably painted the effects of coal smoke. I think the clearest example would be in the painting series of London, Houses of Parliament. Several of them having "effect of fog" or "in the fog" in the title so that's what he was aiming for.

But the effects of his vision change can be seen in the water lilies especially around 1918.

Water lilies stood out to me as well.