Short answers, pulled from the story.
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement marked by visible brush strokes, open composition, and an emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities. It favoured ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception.
The name derives from Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise. The critic Louis Leroy coined the term in a satirical 1874 review of the First Impressionist Exhibition, published in the Parisian newspaper Le Charivari, where he derisively titled his article The Exhibition of the Impressionists.
The central figures included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte, Armand Guillaumin, and Édouard Manet. Pissarro was the only artist to participate in all eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886.
Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists who came to prominence through independent exhibitions during the 1870s and 1880s. Their first exhibition was held in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar, after they founded their own society in December 1873.
Impressionists used short, thick brush strokes applied as impasto to capture a subject's essence rather than its details. They placed colours side by side with little mixing, avoided black paint, worked wet paint into wet paint, used light-coloured grounds, and often painted outdoors en plein air to capture changing sunlight.
The four best-known women Impressionists were Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, and Berthe Morisot. Morisot participated in seven of the eight exhibitions, Cassatt in four, Bracquemond in three, and Gonzalès in none, and they were largely omitted from art historical texts until Tamar Garb's Women Impressionists appeared in 1986.