In the nine­teen-twen­ties, as George Orwell remem­bers it, “Paris was invad­ed by such a swarm of artists, writ­ers, stu­dents, dilet­tan­ti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has prob­a­bly nev­er seen. In some quar­ters of the town the so-called artists must actu­al­ly have out­num­bered the work­ing pop­u­la­tion.” Along stretch­es of the Seine, “it was almost impos­si­ble to pick one’s way between the sketch­ing-stools.” Legit­i­mate or oth­er­wise, these artists were gen­uine descen­dants of Claude Mon­et, at least in the sense that the lat­ter pio­neered paint­ing en plein air, dis­till­ing art direct­ly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pig­ments or buy paints con­tained in frag­ile pig blad­ders,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much eas­i­er to work in a stu­dio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flex­i­ble zinc tubes invent­ed by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a porta­bil­i­ty that made out­door paint­ing easy and fea­si­ble.” As usu­al in moder­ni­ty, a devel­op­ment in tech­nol­o­gy enabled a devel­op­ment in cul­ture, but to show what kind of pos­si­bil­i­ties had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazen­ness: more specif­i­cal­ly, an artist like Mon­et.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and col­or, and the ways they reg­is­ter in the human mind,” Mon­et “reject­ed the pop­u­lar con­ven­tions of his time, which pri­or­i­tized line, col­or, and blend­ed brush­strokes that con­cealed the artist’s hand in favor of sev­er­al short, thick appli­ca­tions of sol­id col­or placed side by side, large­ly unblend­ed.” His paint­ings, which we now cred­it with launch­ing the Impres­sion­ist move­ment, show us not so much col­ors as “col­or rela­tion­ships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the can­vas.” But then, so does real life, whose con­stant­ly chang­ing light ensures that “every few min­utes, we expe­ri­ence a sub­tly dif­fer­ent col­or palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Mon­et’s artis­tic enter­prise more clear­ly demon­strat­ed than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series con­sists of 25 paint­ings depict­ing just what that name sug­gests (and which, belong­ing to Mon­et’s neigh­bor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each paint­ed at a dif­fer­ent time of day. Each image rep­re­sents Mon­et’s attempt to cap­ture the light col­ors just as he per­ceived them at a par­tic­u­lar moment, straight from nature. Tak­en togeth­er, they con­sti­tute “maybe the defin­i­tive expres­sion of the Impres­sion­ist move­ment” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we nev­er tru­ly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now pur­chase a copy of the Nerd­writer’s new book, Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Mon­et to Paint His Final Mas­ter­pieces & Cre­ate “the World’s First Art Instal­la­tion”

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Though most of us see Fran­cis­co Goy­a’s Sat­urno devo­ran­do a su hijo, or Sat­urn Devour­ing His Son, at least every few months, we were nev­er meant to see it all. The same is true of all four­teen of the so-called “Black Paint­ings,” which Goya exe­cut­ed late in his life on the walls of his vil­la out­side Madrid. They now hang at the Pra­do where, as one tour guide put it to the Guardian’s Stephen Phe­lan, “some peo­ple can hard­ly even look at them.” When vis­i­tors enter the room that con­tains these often grim and bizarre visions, “they are always sur­prised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vis­i­tor whose expres­sion hasn’t changed.”

What could have moved Goya to cre­ate such paint­ings? In the new Great Art Explained video essay above, gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne lays out the rel­e­vant fac­tors in Goy­a’s life and the tur­bu­lent soci­ety in which he lived. His Enlight­en­ment views and pen­chant for brazen satire drew sus­pi­cion, as did his will­ing­ness to paint for French and pro-French clients dur­ing that coun­try’s occu­pa­tion of Spain.

At the age of 72 he end­ed up putting him­self into a kind of coun­try­side exile, tak­ing up res­i­dence in an estate called the Quin­ta del Sor­do (the “Vil­la of the Deaf,” and suit­ably enough, since Goya him­self hap­pened to have lost his hear­ing by that point).

It was in the Quin­ta del Sor­do, and indeed on it, that Goya (or, accord­ing to cer­tain the­o­ries, Goy­a’s son) set his artis­tic world­view free to real­ize its most grotesque and jaun­diced forms. Even apart from Sat­urn’s act of can­ni­bal­is­tic fil­i­cide, Phe­lan writes, “a humanoid bil­ly goat in a monk­ish cas­sock bleats a satan­ic ser­mon to a gasp­ing con­gre­ga­tion of witch­es. A des­per­ate­ly expres­sive lit­tle dog appears to plead for res­cue, sub­merged up to its neck in a mud-col­ored mire beneath a gloomy, void-like fir­ma­ment of neg­a­tive space.” Known as El Per­ro, or The Dog, that last art­work is one of the most beloved in Spain — and, in its ascetic way, the most haunt­ing Black Paint­ing of all.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Most Dis­turb­ing Paint­ing: A Close Look at Fran­cis­co Goya’s Sat­urn Devour­ing His Son

Euro­pean Paint­ings: From Leonar­do to Rem­brandt to Goya — A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­dad Car­los III de Madrid (UC3M)

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rem­brandt Data­bas­es Now Online

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Great Art Explained: Watch 15-Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.