The Silent Revolution of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Frame
- Art d'Histoire
- May 28
- 5 min read
Paris, 1852.
Salon regulations mandate the use of gilded frames for the reception of works submitted to the Salon.
Twenty-five years later, curators, jury members, and academicians are scandalised by the thirst for modernity of a young generation of painters whose battle extends even to a detail that seemed beyond discussion: the type of framing.
The Monopoly of the Gilded Frame
Is the choice of frame free? Yes, if it is stored in the studio; no, if it is intended to be exhibited at the Salon in Paris or the Provinces (Paul Gauguin experienced this when he was refused in Rouen for submitting his canvas in a white frame in 1884).
The Salon regulations were slightly adapted each year and printed in the opening pages of the booklet, the Explication des ouvrages de peinture et dessins, sculpture, architecture et gravure…
There, one could read, with slight variations from one year to the next, that any painting lacking a frame would be automatically rejected. Framing was standardised, and over the decades, directives concerning it became more precise, blocking emerging experiments.
In 1884, organisers mandated the use of gilded, black, or dark natural wood borders. The objective was to maintain visual uniformity, but above all to establish the prestigious status of art—whose nobility, that is to say, its liberality, dates back to the creation of the Academy—through the use of gilding or a certain sobriety, a symbol of classicism.
However, for modern painters, concerned with controlling the luminosity and perception of the tones in their painting, framing was an inherent element of their approach because it affected the visual rendering of the canvas.
The Frame According to Chevreul
The works of the chemist Chevreul had long contributed to warnings against gilded frames; more precisely, he offered a reflection on the matching of frames linked to the laws of simultaneous contrasts.
Empirically, Chevreul placed tinted cardboard borders around the perimeter of landscape engravings and observed that a border inevitably projected its complementary colour onto the adjacent areas of the image.
The chemist concluded that it was imperative to adapt the frame to the tones of the image, or at least to take them into consideration, as a white frame could illuminate a canvas according to the rules of the juxtaposition of white that he had also expounded.
The painter Eugène Delacroix had, moreover, dreamed of having his murals at St. Sulpice framed in white, green, or red marble according to their own hues.
The White Alternative and Foreign Influences
Armed with this data, the practitioners of so-called "light painting" or Impressionists began by preferring to present their canvases in white frames at the end of the 1870s.
The choice was all the more welcome as the white frame was inexpensive.
Figures such as Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro adopted these neutral borders during their independent exhibitions, thus allowing the harmonies of the canvases to exist without the visual disturbance of gold, which deposits a layer of violet tone—its complementary—on its surroundings.
But the innovation was not a French exclusivity, nor even a French invention.
French painters exiled to London during the Prussian invasion in 1870-1871 had the opportunity to observe the innovations of the Pre-Raphaelites and James Whistler.
The latter claimed paternity of simplified and painted frames, fearing that his Parisian colleagues would appropriate the invention for themselves.
The question of paternity is secondary; they all knew, if not Chevreul's chapter devoted to the frame, at least the Grammaire des arts du dessin by Charles Blanc. There, Blanc explains the principle of the laws of color juxtaposition and their effects on one another, insisting on the illuminating effect of white, without, it is true, echoing Chevreul's conclusions on the choice of the frame.
In any case, the use of the white frame quickly became a marker of the Impressionist break.
The Chromatic Explosion of the Frame
Applying scientific colour theories, the Impressionists even began to paint their frames, not stopping at white.
From the late 1870s, Mary Cassatt exhibited works surrounded by red and green borders, often drawing the incomprehension and mockery of critics who judged them in bad taste.
Camille Pissarro associated green frames with canvases dominated by red, or violet frames with works on yellow paper.
The sketchbooks of Edgar Degas testify to a concern for the choice of profile, as he drew several different models.
The most extreme was once again Georges Seurat, dissatisfied with a simple white border. He tinted his frame, or even the perimeter of his canvas, with small dots in colors complementary to the painting.
The effect was twofold: on one hand, it exalted the colours through the chosen contrast of the frame, but furthermore, it physically prevented the purchaser of his canvas from totally replacing the framing with a classic gold border by having integrated a frame into his canvas.
His contemporaries, including Paul Signac or Théo van Rysselberghe, occasionally applied these same principles.
But it should be added that it was perhaps Vincent van Gogh who was the first of this group to paint his own frames, as traces are found as early as the spring of 1887, whereas he only discovered that of Seurat's Les Poseuses in February 1888, just before his departure for Arles.
Return of Gold and Current Conservation
The fact remains that the survival of these choices was exceptional.
While the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel agreed, in the early 1880s, to present canvases framed in white in his exhibition rooms, the gilded frame quickly reclaimed its rights. Collectors themselves, attached to the prestige of gilding, hurried to dismantle these overly simple frames.
Edgar Degas, invited to the home of one of his friends, having caught a glimpse of one of his canvases and discovered that the friend in question had dared to replace the original border with a gilded model, took down the painting, removed the frame, and took back his canvas. It is true that Degas was never known for his tolerance.
Today, almost all of these historical frames have been dismantled.
Even Degas's Dancer at Rest, sold at the end of the 20th century with its original flat white frame, was resold twenty years later with a gilded frame. The white had not even been deemed worthy of being preserved and disappeared.
Conversely, in 2022, the Musée d’Orsay had Vincent van Gogh's The Thatchers at Cordeville, Auvers-sur-Oise removed from its 17th-century Italian frame to recreate its original white setting.
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