Some art historians argue the invention of photography in the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the trigger for artists to abandon their quest for 'photographic' realism and pursue something more intangible and inward-looking, a pursuit which led in the first place to what we now call impressionism — and eventually on to total abstraction, an art so inscrutable it alienates many viewers.
Bruce Yardley is certainly someone who is happy with that first staging post within the post-photographic art world’s journey. Referring to the French impressionism of the late 1860s and early 1870s, he says: "Those years represent the extended moment when art acquired a new painterly language without sacrificing its ability to communicate a recognisable image of the visual world."
Bruce is worth listening to. He is one of this country's most respected impressionist painters. He is also a scholar of this school of painting. Indeed, the quote above appears in his book Painting like the Impressionists (Crowood Press, 2021).
So what does Bruce mean by 'a new painterly language’? He's really talking about a loose approach to light, colour and texture that had never been seen before the Impressionists exploded on to the scene. This small band of outsiders broke the rules of establishment art (highly finished classical/religious subjects etc) in order to represent their 'impression' of the contemporary world they saw. At first they were vilified. Today, they are beloved.
Bruce hasn’t had to wait as long as his misunderstood nineteenth-century forerunners for public recognition. He first exhibited with the Catto in 1998, shortly after taking up painting full-time, and this will be his 15th solo show at the gallery. That tells you everything you need to know about the enduring popularity of his work.
Comparing his current paintings with those in previous shows, Bruce says he is struck by how much more architectural in subject matter is this latest crop. He has a particular enthusiasm for cathedral subjects: St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and Cathedral, Notre-Dame, Basilica San Marco, Milan and Cologne all feature here — the latter two both making their first appearance in a Bruce Yardley collection.
In many of these buildings the interior, for Bruce, can be as paintable as the more familiar exterior view. As he rightly comments, the cathedral or church interior is a surprisingly neglected subject — only the Dutch in their Golden Age made something of a specialism of this artistic sub-genre. What makes the neglect surprising is that interior spaces like these, lit as they often are by stained glass windows, offer a uniquely atmospheric light experience.
And on the theme of atmospheric light experience, another feature of Bruce’s more recent work is a growing willingness to tackle dusk and night subjects, very much inspired by the spare, twinkly Thames nocturnes of Whistler. In these paintings the palette is necessarily restricted and all the tonal contrast is provided by the small amounts of sharply-focused artificial light. These are scenes pared down to their tonal essentials. In other words, they are scenes made for the impressionist.
