What constitutes modernity? More to the point, what did modernity mean to the Impressionists? What concept of it did they admit or celebrate in their paintings? The usual and by now routine answers to these questions revolve around the subject of bourgeois recreation. Beginning with Meyer Schapiro’s essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 [January–March 1937]: 77–98) and continuing a half-century later in the work of T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, New York: Knopf, 1984) and Robert Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), historians have focused their attention on Impressionism’s modern iconography of urban residents out and about in Paris, or relaxing and vacationing outdoors in the suburbs and the countryside. At the heart of these studies is the human figure, represented by the Impressionists as an affluent consumer of leisure. While the natural settings in which such individuals appear often feature signs of industrial and technological modernity, the Impressionists reputedly downplayed or restricted those hallmarks of contemporary life through various aestheticizing strategies, including technique itself. If leisure signified modernity in Impressionist painting, then the artists’ capricious-looking brushstrokes were a means of enacting it, a reading first suggested by the critic Louis Leroy in his review of the artists’ inaugural exhibition (“L’Exposition des impressionnistes,” Le Charivari, 25 April 1874).

In Impressionism and the Modern Landscape: Productivity, Technology, and Urbanization from Manet to Van Gogh, James Rubin does not reject this approach to Impressionism but seeks to balance it by turning the spotlight on “Impressionism’s ‘other landscape’” (the title of the book’s introduction): paintings of the physical structures and environments that allowed leisure to flourish. Chief among these are factories, bridges, railroads, new city streets, ports, and other “working” waterways, all of which appear prominently and frequently—Rubin provides statistical evidence for the latter—in Impressionist landscapes from the late 1860s through the 1870s. These subjects, he argues, are not simply straightforward modern motifs but expressions of human inventiveness and productivity, progressive values that are as central to a definition of French bourgeois culture as recreation and pleasure. In his earlier survey of the movement (Impressionism, London: Phaidon, 1999), Rubin touched briefly upon the relationship of Impressionist landscape to the idea of fin-de-siècle modernity as comprised of both technologically advanced modes of production and a desire to escape their effects via amusement and relaxation. This new book explores at length the “production” half of that whole, including the “productive” act of painting.

Rubin makes a compelling case for the representation of progressive values in what he calls the “performance” of painting (12), that is, the artist’s body at work and the record of its physical effort on the canvas. Taking his cues from the critics Armand Silvestre and Émile Zola, for whom the Impressionists’ choppy and conspicuous brushstrokes were evocative of the unhampered activity of manual laborers, Rubin reads Impressionist technique as an embodiment of contemporary productivity, albeit patient and creative rather than unskilled. “In Impressionism,” he writes, “mind and body merge in the hand, which performs the constructive ethos of modernity” (191). According to this reading, a cloud of smoke in an image of a factory, painted in thick daubs of color and swirling strokes of the brush, becomes a sign of the productive work of machinery and artist alike.

Most of this book is a social history of Impressionism’s modern landscape, broken down into thematic chapters: cityscapes set in Paris; photographs of Paris and its suburbs; and landscapes picturing industrial waterways, railroads, and factories. Five artists take center stage: Armand Guillaumin, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro. The paintings by Guillaumin and Sisley, especially, will be new or only vaguely familiar to many readers; the author’s close analyses of them are among the strengths of the book. The selection of works by Caillebotte, Monet, and Pissarro also includes some “fresh faces,” accompanied by quite a number of more widely known images which Rubin rereads and recontextualizes, such as Monet’s Impression: Sunrise (1872), his Boulevard des Capucines (1873), and his Gare Saint-Lazare series; Caillebotte’s views of Baron Haussmann’s new streets; and Pissarro’s paintings of factories at Pontoise and his images of the Seine at Port-Marly and Bougival. Throughout, Impressionist views of industry and transportation are set alongside similar representations in contemporary photographs and illustrations, not with the idea of positing influence of one upon the other but rather to underscore how prevalent such motifs were in the visual culture of the period.

Of the thematic chapters, the first, on Impressionist views of Paris, has the least new to say. Discussions of paintings like Boulevard des Capucines and Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877), for example, do focus on the artists’ celebrations of the city’s commercial energy and its new construction rather than on unhurried flânerie. But Rubin’s overall understanding of Impressionist cityscapes as expressions of an interconnected web of bourgeois leisure, consumption, and productivity remains more reminiscent of the work of past scholars than a novel approach to the subject.

More interesting are the chapters devoted to the iconography of waterways, railroads, and factories. They offer convincing evidence for Rubin’s claims that early Impressionism embraced a modern art of landscape oriented around commercial and industrial activity as much as around leisure, and that such works expressed the confidence of the French middle class in commerce and industry as capable of shaping the nation in positive ways. Rivers, ports, canals, and railroads appear often in Impressionist paintings, both as sites of work and as active avenues of transportation. The boats, barges, and trains they picture moved raw materials and finished products to markets at home and abroad, contributing, along with factories, to national progress. Rubin is quick to point out that leisure is not absent from this equation—nor from the paintings themselves for that matter, in which signs of industry, commerce, and recreation regularly coexist—for boats and trains carried tourists and other pleasure-seekers to the seacoasts and into the countryside, where money spent at hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues further strengthened the nation’s economy.

These chapters are full of new interpretations of paintings, along with a wealth of fascinating historical information brought to bear upon them. But they would benefit from a consideration of how early Impressionist landscapes, individually and collectively, were received by critics and public alike. If, as Rubin persuasively argues, their signs of industrial and productive modernity coincided with bourgeois principles, did the reception and purchase of specific canvases confirm that fact? And if so, how? These questions call for further investigation.

The book’s concluding chapters are more firmly grounded in contemporary opinion. They examine the revival of the themes and organizational structure of early Impressionism in the landscapes of the Neo-Impressionists, as well as the political implications of Impressionism. Rubin follows the lead of art critic Félix Fénéon who in 1886 championed the Neo-Impressionists as new leaders of the avant-garde by focusing on their pointillist technique while ignoring their industrial subjects. Thus, landscapes picturing railroads, factories, bridges, and working rivers by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Pissarro (whose work spanned both movements) are read by Rubin not as radical departures from Impressionism but as a return to its initial thematic objectives. Likewise, Neo-Impressionism’s clarion call of aesthetic independence and its cooperative and decentralized organization are understood as renewals of earlier and similar Impressionist practice.

At the heart of Rubin’s argument for early Impressionism as a precursor to Neo-Impressionism is the issue of politics. He underscores the politicization of both movements by their respective critics, who perceived the artists’ “free” and unorthodox painting styles, coupled with their progressive organizational and exhibition strategies, as left-of-center. Those who know Philip Nord’s Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2000) will find some of this material familiar. Rubin approaches the subject by stressing the radical significance of the Impressionists’ workman-like, performative technique, tracing its roots back to the working methods of Gustave Courbet. Courbet’s intentions as an artist were openly political; the same cannot be said of the Impressionists, as Rubin makes perfectly clear. If their modern landscape imagery indeed “contributed to [their] early reputation for radicalism” (7), as he asserts, the question remains as to whether that imagery was politically motivated. Rubin’s answer would seem to be “no.” “In the end,” he writes, “Impressionist representations of economic productivity were as allied with bourgeois interests as its representations of leisure were” (185).

The question of political intent is far easier to answer for the Neo-Impressionists, whose engagement with anarchist politics is well-known. Rubin acknowledges this in his discussions of Pissarro’s pointillist images of rural labor, but downplays its importance in relation to landscapes by other members of the group. The industrial and working-class landscapes of Signac and Maximilien Luce, for example, both of whom were staunch anarchists, not only were very likely politically motivated but often were read that way by critics in the 1880s and early 1890s. A flaw in Rubin’s argument is his failure to examine Neo-Impressionism with this in mind. While it makes sense to say that Neo-Impressionism renewed Impressionism’s initial commitment to industrial modernity, it did so in ways more politically distinct and more intentional than this book fully admits.

Impressionism and the Modern Landscape is an important addition to late nineteenth-century French studies. It succeeds admirably in giving some balance to a large body of scholarship focused on leisure and pleasure in Impressionist painting, as opposed to equally significant industrial and commercial motifs. Above all, the new visual territory it opens up provides a springboard for future studies of Impressionist landscapes as sites of modernity.