Goal
- Learn how Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters used unusual composition — cropping, diagonals, scale, and framing — not just loose brushwork, to change how a picture feels.
- Compare a few different approaches to composition within the same room.
Impressionism and Beyond (Gallery 255, Sidney and Esther Rabb Gallery)
Dance at Bougival, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1883, oil on canvas — a dancing couple cropped close and cut off by the canvas edge like a snapshot, with a strong diagonal pulling your eye through the crowd
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, Paul Gauguin, 1897–98, oil on canvas — an enormous, frieze-like composition meant to be read right to left, following a Tahitian community from birth to old age
Houses at Auvers, Vincent van Gogh, 1890, oil on canvas — tilted rooftops and a steep hillside compressed into a flattened, almost tipped-over view
In the Renoir, the dancers are cut off by the edge of the painting — why might the artist choose not to show their whole bodies?
Activity
Frame-finder — using an empty picture frame or hands held in an "L" shape, students "crop" different parts of one painting to see how the composition changes depending on what's included or left out.
At-home project
Take a photo (or make a drawing) of a moment at home, but crop it like Renoir did — cut off part of a person or object at the edge of the frame to make it feel like a snapshot of real life.
Sources
Source: Impressionism and Beyond · MFA Boston
Note: this gallery is the same room as L8 (Gallery 255) — L7 uses different works (Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh) with a composition lens, while L8 keeps its original three (Degas, Caillebotte, Cézanne) with an everyday-life lens. Let me know if you'd rather I move one of these to a different gallery for more physical variety across the semester.