What is the point of painting people who are working? The question is provoked by Claude Monet’s canvass of stevedores unloading coal at Clichy on the Seine. Déchargeur de charbon à Clichy is often held up as the first example of an Impressionist painting featuring work itself. In fact, it does nothing of the sort.
Déchargeurs is on show here at the French capital’s Musée d’Orsay, home to what must be the biggest range of Impressionist paintings anywhere. While many of them feature the consequences of people’s work – Monet’s series on the theme of hayricks for example – only a handful of them actually show people in the process of making things or doing “work”, putting on display the physical and mental effort involved.
In any case, the hayrick was an excuse to explore shifting tones across the day, not to highlight the skill with which these ricks were put together. Van Gogh’s mesmerising painting of a couple at rest in the shade of a rick they have just erected under the blaze of a summer sun, shows them recovering, not working. It’s there at Orsay too, though the colour in the reproduction is nowhere near the heat-filled tones of the original.
