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The New Mexico Mueum of Art has an exhibition on American Impressionism. There we learn that a major characteristic of impressionism is that is it en plein air, that is painted not in a studio, but in open nature. As such, impressionism focuses on painting the light and air, rather than the details exposed by the light and air. Impressionist painting got it’s start at the middle of the 19th century, this date is important.

Here is the interesting thing, the generalities which I will talk about in a minute. Light, as physical manifestation which allows us to see the world, was first formally described in Europe by Isaac Newton at the turn of the 18th century. It was the science that defined the 18th century in the same way that Galileo Gallei defined the 17th century. From newton we learn that things are not inherently red or orange(I am talking in modern language here) but only that we see light reflected from them that are that color. We see this idea permeate the world and we see the effects of this idea affecting the way impressionists painting. They paint the light, not the object.

Likewise, the end of the 118 century began a process by which europe began to realize that the air was a physical object, made up of many different parts. Oxygen was isolated in 1782.and by 1789 we had the idea that the parts of a compound were in constant proportion, that is, in modern language, that water is always 2 hydrogens and 1 oxygen. By 1811 we had the idea that different stuff existed, and it exibited the property that the same mass of stuff always lead to the the same number of stuff. In 1815 we have the idea that atoms have a common mass, all which are multiple of Hydrogen. By the late 19th century, we have the periodic table. We don’t paint what we see, because what we see are just made up of a small and common set of atoms.

During the 19th century, the view of the world shifted from a solid reality to a complex interaction between light and air. When philosophy changes, everything moves with it. It is not that so much that the science of the times caused impressionism, or that impressionism caused the science of the times, but that both existed in world where air was no longer just an æther, but a combination of atoms, which were distinct. Light was not longer something that separated night and day, but a wave that allowed us to see the world.  This light and air, that had been so long ignored, now has an art form of it’s own.

Perhaps art is what lead to the 20th century realization that light and atoms and the world are not as clear cut as we though in the 19th century.  Perhaps cubism helps deal with the reality that most small things are probabilistic, not certainties.  Perhaps the evolution of expressionism into modern abstract, such as Kandinsky, is the evolution from planetary orbital atomic shells to the atomic clouds.   I think it is wise to keep an eye on art as a metric on what might be happening in the other natural philosophies.