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Ground into a fine powder, pastels reflect light in hundreds of directions. White, especially, appears to bloom straight off the page—a flash bulb, a shock. Attempts to preserve it with surface coating diminishes its luster, so most artists go without; we are left with the raw residue of a struggle, the roughness of the paper catching pigment from the colored stick as it is dragged across the page. It is a medium brilliant and unstable in equal measure, on the precipice of being snuffed out, like death itself is encoded in its DNA. Sometimes, it literally has been: the first green pastel, a toxically beautiful deep emerald hue that appeared in the late 1700s, was laced with arsenic. What American Impressionist Robert Vonnoh saw when he walked into Durand-Ruel’s Impressionist exhibit in New York City in 1886 was a glow he’d likely never encountered before—the vivid electricity of Degas’ “Choristes” and the fanning float of white tulle in “The Dance Lesson.” Pastels were not new (see Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Scapigliata,” for example), but their status as legitimate works of art was. Historically, pastel was seen as a preparatory medium, its fragility relegating it to a second-tier place on the artistic ladder. But to the French Impressionists, that fleeting quality was what made it the perfect vessel for vivid snapshots of Parisian life and the French countryside. In 1874, Degas and Morisot and Monet and the rest of that renegade gang decided to afford pastel equal footing with their oils, displaying them side by side on the gallery walls for the first Impressionist exhibition. That torch of upended hierarchy was carried across the Atlantic by Durand-Ruel; its burning white opacity bloomed anew in the work of Robert Vonnoh. The trees of “Spring Blossoms” share characteristics with Vonnoh’s other landscapes of Grez-sur-Loing in France—the first signs of spring were a favorite subject of his (and of many Impressionists), with tentative pops of color from the earliest buds and flowers hanging strangely against still winter-tinted skies. But compare “Spring Blossoms” to Vonnoh’s oil “Grez-sur-Loing” and you’ll discover a newer sense of freedom and play in his work, a potential opened up by the lack of firmly established conventions around pastels. Scribbles of green grass dance like the riffles of waves across the paper, running into the occasional intrusion of blue (a floral ground cover of sorts, perhaps) and sweet white petals brightly punctuating the earth like a random metronome, a reminder that you missed the moment, just a second ago, when they were up in the tree. And oh, those trees. Apple, maybe, or almond—the two harbingers of the warmer months in France. Their velvet burst of pure white is a world all its own, akin to the brazen daubs of red Vonnoh employed for his earlier poppy series in oil. The sketchier, barer limbs in the background of “Spring Blossoms” await their turn, like dancers in the wings. We are watching a birth, a process, a challenge to accept that just as a tree is a tree even when it is without a single leaf, so too is this a finished piece even with its cruder improvisations sitting neatly beside more fully realized renderings. This is nature, unpolished—and Vonnoh merges his identity as an artist with that distinction, too. His green signature in the lower left corner appears much like the grass around it: uneven, untamed, growing, free. If you would like to inquire about this work, head here.
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