stic example was partially their ability to articulate their goals of recording light itself and partially their choice of subjects so different from the people and things then being seen on the wall of the established galleries. Some of what the impressionists were trying to achieve was explicitly derived from the rising interest of artists in the sciences.
Ironically, as science and mathematics became more exact and less subjective arts, they became more interesting to artists. The scientific understanding of what color actually is and the chemical composition of paint pigment, for instance, were extremely useful to an artist attempting to capture the essence of a ripe peach on a canvas that would maintain its color for hundreds of years. Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of figures in motion substantially altered artistic renderings of events that happened too quickly for the artist's eye to accurately record them; his 1872 photographs of a galloping horse, for instance, point up the physical inaccuracies of works like Theodore Gericault's 1821 Hors
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