I have almost finished the biography of a scientific hero of mine, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes. One observation in the book has particularly struck me, and that is that de Gennes viewed his approach as more like that of the Impressionist artists, and less like the approach of the artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

I am no expert on 19th century art, but Impressionism was a movement in the 19th century, that include Monet, Renoir etc. According to the Wikipedia page, they emphasised the play of light on the landscape, and in contrast to earlier work, the brushstrokes are large and visible. Above is a beautiful Impressionist landscape by Monet, called The Cliffs at Etretat. By contrast, in portraits like that of Napoleon, to the right, Ingres sought to impress with rich details, such as those on Napoleon’s rather impressive get-up.

So, the idea here is that de Gennes’s approach was a broad brush approach, using only simple ingredients to describe the behaviour of a physical system. This is analagous to Impressionism, but very different to Ingres’s detail heavy approach.

I think this is a beautiful comparison. It is lovely idea that a model that tries to capture the essential physics of a system, using a few simple ingredients, is like an Impressionist painting that tries to capture the play of light on a landscape, with simple brush strokes. You can ask yourself if you think you are more of an Impressionist, or more of an Ingres.