Lay for the Day 25th April

1874: the Parisian satirical paper Charivari reviews a co-operative exhibition organised by the Anonymous Society of Artists. The reviewer, Louis Leroy, scoffs at the work, making particular mock of a painting by Claude Monet called ‘Impression: Sunrise’. The article is headlined “Exposition des impressionnistes”, and gives its name to the most popular artistic style of the last two centuries. The exhibition contained work by most of the major figures of Impressionism, including Degas, Cézanne, Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Pisarro and Sisley.

A London impression:

Sleepless

Sleepless in his globe, the goldfish blinks
a doleful mouth, incessant, startled,
orange paint rubbing off his tinfoil sides.
Look out the window – rain starts up,
riddling the headlights, the streets seem submerged
and the houses broken moles where enlarged
eyes are drawn to stare through the glass, subject
to that cloud-wracked yellow moon.

But on finer nights you can breathe freely.
The streetlights of the city infiltrate
the sky like a dust, raddling its lilac,
and the back-garden trees are stilled under
a lick of warm light framed by the window.
He circulates clear water, nosing weed,
swivelling, flushing his gills.

John Gibbens, from Pisces

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