The craft of the blacksmith goes back long before the Iron Age, but once our ancestors had learned to work cast iron (by turning it first into wrought iron), in about 1200 BCE, it became one of the key crafts in many societies. It’s also the only craft represented by a deity in the classical Greek pantheon, in the god Hephaistos, translated by the Romans to Vulcan.

He had the misfortune to have been born lame, as a result of which Hera tried to be rid of him, and threw him into the sea. He was there cared for by Thetis and others. He later assumes his role as the god of fire, volcanoes, and crafts allied to blacksmithing, including sculpture.

In paintings, Vulcan is characteristically seen in his forge, as in Tintoretto’s painterly Vulcan’s Forge (1578), one of four mythological paintings he made for the Atrio Quadrato in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Tintoretto was clearly familiar with the division of labour in a blacksmith’s workshop. The two well-muscled men wielding large hammers are strikers, whose brute force is more important. Vulcan is the older man at the left, who strikes the casting with his small hammer to tell them where theirs should strike.

Homer’s story of the adulterous affair of the wife of Hephaistos, Aphrodite (Venus), with Ares (Mars) is retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the likely source for Diego Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan from 1630. This shows Apollo, at the left, visiting Hephaistos (to the right of Apollo) in his forge, to tell him about this infidelity.

Homeric Laughter (1909) is one of Lovis Corinth’s most complex, even abstruse, paintings of classical myth. He provides a good clue as to its interpretation in his inscription (originally in German translation):
unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods as they saw the craft of wise Hephaistos
together with the reference to Homer’s Odyssey book 8 line 326.

In this first version, Corinth shows Aphrodite recumbent on the bed, shielding her eyes from the crowd around her. Ares struggles with the net securing the couple, looking frustrated. Hephaistos, clad in black with his tools slung around his waist, is talking to Poseidon (who wears a crown) with Dionysos/Bacchus behind him (clutching a champagne glass). At the right edge is Hermes/Mercury, with his winged helmet. Sundry putti are playing with Ares’ armour, and an arc of putti adorns the sky.

The blacksmith also features in some accounts of the origin of Pandora.

John Dixon Batten’s The Creation of Pandora was painted anachronistically in egg tempera on a fresco ground by 1913. Batten was one of the late adherents of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and is now almost forgotten. This work had been put into storage in 1949 and wasn’t rediscovered until 1990.

Pandora is at the centre, having just been fashioned out of earth by Hephaestus, who stands at the left, his foot on his anvil. Behind them, other blacksmiths work metal in his forge. At the right, Athena is about to place her gift of a robe about Pandora’s figure, and other gods queue behind to offer their contributions.

There are several fine paintings of regular blacksmiths at work over the centuries. The earliest I have been able to locate is a disturbing detail in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Last Judgment from about 1495-1505.

Among the torments featured in the centre panel are painful punishments in the blacksmith’s at the top.

Francisco Goya’s Forge from 1817 is a superb depiction of the physically demanding work of the blacksmith. Its extensive use of black is also a herald of the Black Period to come in Goya’s paintings at the end of that decade.

Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875 shows the village blacksmiths still at work long after the Industrial Revolution brought steam-powered hammers.

Ernst Josephson’s Spanish Blacksmiths from 1882 shows a smith in the shredded remains of his white shirt, and his striker to the right in his black waistcoat, with a horseshoe hanging below the roof of their forge in Seville.

Döme Skuteczky’s painting In the Smithy from 1897 shows another smithy, this time in Slovakia.

These days, across much of Europe the traditional blacksmith earns their keep from forging horseshoes for the many horses ridden for pleasure.

While artists from around the world had gathered in the colony at Grez-sur-Loing, little more than 12 km (7 miles) downstream, French Impressionism was flourishing at Moret-sur-Loing. Alfred Sisley and his family moved there in 1880, and this was to be the centre of his painting for most of the rest of his life. Their first house there was in Veneux-Nadon (now Veneux-Les Sablons), on the road to the village of By.

Moret had good rail connections with central Paris, although in 1881 Sisley wrote that the journey took two hours, sufficiently long for him to excuse himself from visiting the city. He lived there in quiet isolation with his family; a few visitors including Berthe Morisot and Stéphane Mallarmé made their way out to see him. But the nineteen years that he lived in or near Moret were highly productive, with a total of 550 oil paintings, several sketchbooks, and a few pastels.

Sisley experimented with his facture and style at this time. On the Hills of Moret in the Spring – Morning from 1880 looks down from one of those low hills towards the town. The brushwork in the foreground is composed of short strokes of near-white and colour, giving the hillside a distinctive texture.

By the end of 1881, the Sisley family had moved into the town of Moret. This was apparently financed in part by a loan from his dealer Durand-Ruel. About a year later, Sisley decided that the air in Moret didn’t suit him, or possibly he needed to keep on the move from his creditors, and the family moved to Les Sablons until 1886.

During Sisley’s time at Moret, he explored the banks of the rivers and canal, producing some of his best-known paintings. The Banks of the Loing towards Moret from 1883 is one his earlier riverside views, showing unusual combinations of reflections of tall trees, working craft and small industry, and distant chalk cliffs.

This view of The Loing Canal from 1884 is another fine example from near Saint-Mammès. This waterway runs parallel to the River Loing, connecting the Briare Canal to the River Seine, and is one of the series of waterways joining Paris to Lyon known as the Bourbonnais Route. These were constructed in the early eighteenth century, and still carry barges of grain from the farms in central France.

As with many of his waterside paintings, much of the canvas is occupied by the sky, which Sisley wrote that he always painted first so as to set the scene and mood for the whole painting.

Although Sisley, unlike Monet and Pissarro, painted few formal series, some of his motifs group together. The Canal du Loing, here seen in 1885, is in one of those groups. These typically have a low horizon, and reiterate his emphasis on the sky setting the mood and tone of his paintings. Below that, the water shimmers with the reflected buildings and relatively coarse brushstrokes rather than the more staccato style seen developing in Pissarro’s landscapes of this time.

Another group is exemplified by Moret – The Banks of the River Loing, probably painted in the autumn/fall of 1885, with its slightly coarser marks and strong colour contrasts. These bring the foreground closer, and push the background deep.

Sisley also recognised the visual potential of the town of Moret and its bridge, a motif that was to dominate his later work. The Bridge at Moret, Storm Effect from 1887 is an early plein air sketch capturing the approach of a storm, with the sky remaining bright for the moment, but the gathering wind already driving up small waves on the River Loing.

Sisley seems to have started another group showing the avenue of poplars at Moret-sur-Loing in 1888.

In 1892 he painted this barren winter landscape of The Canal du Loing at Moret, with its pale stand of poplars beating their rhythm across the canvas before curving into the distance.

In Moret Bridge in the Sunlight from the same year, Sisley settles on an angle of view over the town that was to prove his favourite, capturing the main spans of the bridge, the Porte de Bourgogne and the town’s Gothic church beyond.

Sisley’s most formal and conscious attempt at series painting is that of the Church at Moret-sur-Loing, a tight series with two branches consisting of fourteen paintings, completed in 1893-94, when Monet was reworking his Rouen series in the studio.

Sisley’s emphasis in this series is shown well in The Church at Moret, Evening, from 1894, and is quite different from Monet’s. As MaryAnne Stevens puts it, “Monet painted the air that lay between his eye and the façade”, while “Sisley focused on the physical mass of the structure, using different light conditions to accentuate his subject’s architectonic quality.”

Sisley remained in Moret, painting in poverty and isolation, until 1897, when he and his longstanding partner Eugénie visited South Wales and married at long last in Cardiff Town Hall. They arrived back in Moret-sur-Loing on 1 October 1897. On 8 October the following year, Eugénie Sisley died at Moret. By then, Alfred had developed his terminal illness, cancer of the throat, and was gravely ill himself. He died at Moret-sur-Loing on 29 January 1899, shortly before Asai Chū arrived in Grez-sur-Loing.

When the French Impressionists reassembled after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, they gathered a little further up river from Louveciennes and Bougival, at the small town of Argenteuil on the north bank of the River Seine. At the time it was just on the outer edge of the north-western suburbs of the city, about 12 km (7.6 miles) from the centre, and was only fifteen minutes by train to the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. Claude Monet was able to commute into the metropolis, and the Sisleys moved in with the Monets in 1872. This weekend I show a small selection of the best-known paintings that were made in and around Argenteuil, and particularly at Chatou, down river.

Although Monet was barely making a living from his art at this time, he was among the few who could afford to use cadmium yellow, which has been found in his painting of The Artist’s House at Argenteuil from 1873.

This marked the start of a highly productive period for Alfred Sisley, and, in conjunction with Monet and Renoir, changed his art. The three concentrated their efforts on the recording of transient effects of light using colour, removing black from their palettes, and abandoning the traditional ‘finish’ of their paintings.

Sisley’s Footbridge at Argenteuil from 1872 is dominated by the perspective projection of the bridge itself, almost to the exclusion of the river below. His figures are gestural but look natural in their forms.

The Impressionists occasionally painted themselves at work, particularly during the earlier years of the movement. Above is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Monet Painting in his Garden in Argenteuil from 1873. He is using a conventional lightweight wooden easel, with a small canvas allowing him to work standing, with his oil paints in the pochade box under the easel.

Monet’s The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1873) is one of his several landscapes centred on the railway from the years immediately after the Franco-Prussian War. The following year, he painted the same bridge, as seen below in The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil (1874).

Monet’s commute ended at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, where in 1877 he obtained permission to paint a series of works showing the station. By the third Impressionist Exhibition of April of that year, Monet had assembled seven views of the station, including one that even seemed to please the critics. Among the paintings from that campaign is his Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare (1877).

One of the products of Renoir’s painting with Monet was this highly chromatic view of The Duck Pond (1873) at a farm near Argenteuil.

The following summer, Renoir visited Argenteuil again, to paint in the company of both Monet and Manet. The Seine at Chatou (1874) is one of his more vigorously crafted works, with a water surface similar to those being painted at the time by Sisley.

Monet’s masterwork Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil from 1873 is a textbook example of a river landscape in autumn painted in high Impressionist style, with high chroma and loose brushstrokes.

With the Paris Commune crushed in 1871, and order being restored to France under the new Republic, the Pissarros returned to live a more settled life in Louveciennes again, after the shock of discovering that most of his 1500 or so paintings had been damaged or destroyed by occupying Prussian soldiers. There Pissarro lived close to Alfred Sisley, and the two often painted in company. Renoir’s mother also lived in the village, enabling the three painters to meet frequently.

Among Pissarro’s favourite motifs in this post-war period were numerous views of the Route de Saint-Germain and other roads around Louveciennes, and the River Seine at Bougival.

Less known are his watercolours, such as this view of Louveciennes, Route de Saint-Germain from 1871, and are reminiscent of the paintings of Johan Jongkind.

Pissarro painted this woodland view of an Avenue in the Parc de Marly in the autumn of 1871. It looks towards the village of Marly-le-Roi from the Port du Phare, inside the grounds of the Château de Marly. His skilful use of staffage draws the eye towards the far end of the avenue. The artist seems to have sold this painting quite quickly to an unknown buyer, from whom Durand-Ruel bought it in early 1873.

Alfred Sisley also painted here en plein air, as seen in The Seine at Bougival from 1872. The water surface is mirror-smooth, and Sisley has been careful to paint the reflection of the buildings with optical precision.

This is Pissarro’s wintry scene of The Post-House, the Route de Versailles, Louveciennes, Effect of Snow from 1872. This looks from the ‘Royal Gate’ of the Château de Marly towards the post-house, a landmark featured in several of his works from this period. This painting was bought that Spring by Durand-Ruel, who sold it a year later to Jean-Baptiste Faure, the opera singer, Pissarro’s first collector and Sisley’s enduring patron.

Pissarro must have taken delight in the weird forms of the trees in this Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes, painted in 1872. In the far distance is the massive warm cream stone of Marly Aqueduct.

Although the Pissarros were able to live on the money generated by Camille’s painting, they must have got by in relative poverty. However, in 1872, he sold four stretched canvas overdoor panels depicting the seasons to the banker Achille Arosa for 100 Francs each. Pissarro tried to buy them back when they came up for auction in 1891, but despite appealing to Vincent van Gogh’s brother Theo, they were sold for just over a thousand Francs to the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, and have remained in private collections since.

In April 1872, the Pissarros moved from Louveciennes to Pontoise, where they rented a house and Camille established his studio.

Sisley wasn’t as prolific as Pissarro in either ‘road’ or snow scenes. His Snow on the Road, Louveciennes (1874) clearly comes from the same school, but his trees and buildings remain distinctive.

Sisley’s Aqueduct at Marly (1874) shows the massive form of this aqueduct which appeared in the distance in Pissarro’s Chestnut Grove at Louveciennes above. This and the nearby Machine de Marly, which Sisley also painted, were part of a monumental hydraulic network built in the 1680s for Louis XIV, to supply water to the Château de Marly and the royal gardens of the Palace at Versailles. The stone tower at the right end of the aqueduct is the Tour de Levant, used by Prussian troops as a vantage point for observing the besieged city of Paris, a point that won’t have escaped Sisley’s attention.

Sisley’s Forge at Marly-le-Roi from 1875 shows the village blacksmiths at work.

In 1876, Félicien Rops must have visited one of the popular bathing resorts nearby, to paint his Sunday in Bougival. This shows a lecherous old man watching two young women preparing to bathe there, a mere 15 km (10 miles) from the heart of Paris.

By this time, the Impressionists had moved away from Louveciennes, and were painting elsewhere.

Although Sisley was now living near Sèvres, he must have returned in about 1879 for one last painting in front of the motif, on The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes. This is an example of his more sketchy plein air paintings from his time at Sèvres, and a more traditional perspective view of a road of the time. This section of the road is close to Louveciennes, on the main route between Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At that point, the Impressionists finally left Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun to rest in peace.

When the prolific portraitist in pastels Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun retired to live near Paris, she chose a small hamlet to the west of the city, between the palace at Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Louveciennes. She died there in 1842, and is buried in the graveyard not far from her house.

Twenty-seven years later it became the focus for a group of friends, who went on to become the core of the French Impressionists. For the next few years Louveciennes and the adjacent villages of Bougival and Marly-le-Roi were to appear in well over a hundred of their paintings, a few of which I show this weekend.

Just beyond Chatou, the River Seine sweeps to the right in a bend with a series of long islands with popular bathing houses, among them the famous La Grenouillère. In the summer of 1869, Auguste Renoir was living at his parents’ house in Louveciennes, just to the south of this bend, where Camille Pissarro and his family were renting a house. He visited Claude Monet and his family, who were living near Bougival, also on that bend, and they often painted together.

Some of the formative moments in Impressionism if not European art occurred when Monet and Renoir visited La Grenouillère.

Renoir painted at least three different views of La Grenouillère that summer: that above is now in Stockholm, and that below, which is most similar to Monet’s, is in the Oskar Reinhart Collection in Switzerland; the third (not shown here) is in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Originally conceived as plein air sketches preparatory to more finished paintings for submission to the Salon the following year, they came to define these brilliant shimmering images formed from high chroma brushstrokes as Impressionist style.

If Impressionism has to have a single moment of birth, it’s surely in the summer of 1869 at La Grenouillère.

Monet’s Bathers at la Grenouillère is his early statement of his Impressionist agenda. The pair realised that Impressionism was about these sketched instants. This also reveals Monet’s preference for modern pigments, as most of the brighter mid-blues here use cobalt blue, introduced earlier in the nineteenth century.

In addition to Renoir, Pissarro and Monet, Alfred Sisley maintained a studio nearer the river in Bougival, where the four artists painted, starved and fought off despair together.

Pissarro painted a succession of views of the roads around the village. His Road to Versailles at Louveciennes (Snow Effect) (1869) is typical of his earlier ‘road’ paintings, showing an avenue of tall, bare-branched trees, brushed in coarsely.

The following winter his paintings concentrated on road scenes around Louveciennes, a theme which continued for many years, spanning the seasons.

As many artists before him, Pissarro used trees to frame his motifs in repoussouir, but during the late 1860s they started to invade more central areas of the canvas. In about 1869, in his Winter Landscape at Louveciennes for the first time tree trunks and branches spread across his canvas, breaking up the motif behind into small sections.

Pissarro’s Houses at Bougival, Autumn is clearly dated 1870, although by that time he had moved from Louveciennes. It is also thought to have been exhibited at the Salon that year, suggesting it may have been started in late 1869.

Like Pissarro, Sisley started depicting the streets of suburbs, including Early Snow in Louveciennes. This has been dated to 1870, although it appears more likely that it was painted en plein air late the previous year.

Following the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, in September 1870 the Pissarros’ house in Louveciennes was requisitioned by the invading Prussians. The family fled first to their friends in Montfoucault, then in December travelled on to England, where they settled in Norwood, at that time an outer suburb of London. When in England, Pissarro met Paul Durand-Ruel, who became his dealer, and Claude Monet, who had also fled to London.

Bougival was also overrun by Prussian soldiers, who commandeered Sisley’s studio; many of his early works were lost, as Pissarro’s were in Louveciennes, just over a mile away. The Sisleys were forced into the city of Paris, and despite Alfred’s British nationality, they remained trapped through the siege of the city into the following year. Worse still, the Sisley family business collapsed and his parents were in no position to support the artist.

By the early 1860s, the large and ancient Forest of Fontainebleau, to the south-east of Paris, had been attracting those of the Barbizon School, who painted realist landscapes in front of the motif. The next generation started visiting in 1865, and went on to form the French Impressionists.

In May 1865, the young Frédéric Bazille left the city of Paris for the Forest of Fontainebleau, where he painted Landscape at Chailly (1865) in company with Claude Monet, and possibly Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley. Although clearly influenced by the Barbizon School, his colours are much brighter, and escape the rather sombre browns and greens that dominated much of the work of that earlier art.

Sisley painted this Avenue of Chestnut Trees in La Celle-Saint-Cloud to the west of the forest in 1865, again in Barbizon style. He didn’t submit it to the Salon until 1867, when it was refused. It then remained unsold for ten years before being bought by Sisley’s patron Jean-Baptiste Faure, a celebrated opera singer.

The following year, Sisley walked through the forest with Renoir. He then stayed in the village of Marlotte, where Renoir, Monet, Bazille, Pissarro and Cézanne also visited to paint.

Sisley was more successful with Women Going to the Woods, completed in 1866. This was one of his two paintings exhibited at the Salon that year, and shows the main street in the village of Marlotte with a little rustic staffage.

Clearing in the Woods (1865) is Renoir’s first substantial (surviving) landscape painting, and shows strong influence from Corot. He adopts quite a detailed realist style in this view of a clearing in the midst of massive chestnut trees. These are believed to be near the small village of La Celle-St-Cloud, to the west of Paris not far from Bougival, rather than in the forest. It’s likely that he painted there in the company of Alfred Sisley, who made two views of the same site in very different style.

The following year Renoir painted his friend Jules Le Coeur and his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau. This is unusual among his works, as it was preceded by two studies, and all three were made using the palette knife rather than brushes. This makes it most likely to have been painted before Renoir abandoned the knife and returned to the brush, by the middle of May 1866.

The following year Abbott Handerson Thayer, an American artist who trained in Paris, painted this wonderful oil sketch of Landscape at Fontainebleau Forest (c 1876). This is probably the loosest and most Impressionist painting of his career.

At some time in the late nineteenth century, the wealthy industrialist, amateur painter and patron of Impressionism, Henri Rouart painted In Fontainebleau Forest. This may have been inspired by Corot, but is a realist study in light, shade, and the texture of bark.

John Ferguson Weir was another American painter who had trained in Paris, and became the first director of the School of Fine Arts at Yale University. He visited in about 1902, when he painted Forest of Fontainebleau (c 1902), with its tiny solitary figure against the fallen trunk.

In 1867 Théodore Rousseau died in the village of Barbizon, and he was followed in 1875 by Jean-François Millet. By the twentieth century the forest had fallen out of favour with the new generation.