Impressionism

• 1. Introduction

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  Impressionism took its name from an insult. In 1874, the critic Louis Leroy walked through an independent exhibition in Paris and stopped before a hazy seascape by Claude Monet titled Impression, Sunrise. In a satirical review for the newspaper Le Charivari, he sneered that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than that painting. He titled his piece The Exhibition of the Impressionists, meaning it as ridicule. The name stuck, and the artists embraced it. This is a story of painters who broke the rules of the most powerful art institution in France. They abandoned the studio for the open air. They left their brush strokes visible instead of hiding the artist's hand. They chased the changing light of a single moment. Who were these radicals, and why did the public first come to laugh? How did a movement built on rejection end up shaping painting styles, music, and literature for generations? And what did it mean to paint not the details of a thing, but the sensation it left in the eye?

• 2. The Academy And Its Rules

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  The Académie des Beaux-Arts governed French art in the middle of the 19th century, a time when Emperor Napoleon III was rebuilding Paris and waging war. It preserved the traditional standards of what painting should look like. Historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits were prized. Landscape and still life were dismissed as lesser pursuits. The Académie favoured carefully finished images that held up to close inspection, with precise brush strokes blended to conceal the artist's hand. Colour was kept restrained, often dulled further by a thick golden varnish. The Académie ran an annual juried show called the Salon de Paris, where acceptance brought prizes, commissions, and prestige. Artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexandre Cabanel embodied its values, producing escapist visions of an ordered world using linear perspective and figure types drawn from Classical Greek art. By the 1850s the Realist painter Gustave Courbet had drawn both attention and censure by showing contemporary life without the idealisation the Académie demanded. The next break would come from four young men who met while studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre.

• 3. Four Painters In Open Air

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  Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille discovered in the early 1860s a shared appetite for landscape and contemporary life over historical or mythological scenes. Following a practice pioneered by the Englishman John Constable, they often went into the countryside together to paint outdoors. Their aim was not to make sketches for finished studio works, but to complete the paintings out-of-doors. Painting directly from nature in sunlight, they used the vivid synthetic pigments that had become available since the century's start. A lighter, brighter manner emerged, extending the Realism of Courbet and the Barbizon school. The Café Guerbois on the Avenue de Clichy became a favourite meeting place, where Édouard Manet, whom the younger painters admired, often led the discussions. Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin soon joined the circle. The Salon jury, meanwhile, kept rejecting roughly half of what Monet and his friends submitted, preferring artists faithful to the approved style. The tension was building toward a public confrontation.

• 4. Rejection And Revolt

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  In 1863 the Salon jury rejected Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, mainly because it placed a nude woman beside two clothed men at a picnic. The jury accepted nudes in historical and allegorical paintings, but condemned a realistic nude in a contemporary setting. So many works were turned away that year that French artists were unsettled. After seeing the rejected paintings, Napoleon III decreed that the public should judge for themselves, and the Salon des Refusés was organised. Many came only to laugh, yet it drew more visitors than the regular Salon and signalled a new tendency in art. Petitions for another Salon des Refusés in 1867 and again in 1872 were denied. In December 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, and others founded the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs to exhibit independently. Members were expected to forswear the Salon. They invited progressive artists including the older Eugène Boudin, whose example had first led Monet to plein air painting. Johan Jongkind and Manet declined. In total thirty artists took part in the first exhibition, held in April 1874 at the studio of the photographer Nadar.

• 5. A Diverse And Fractious Group

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  Monet and Cézanne drew the harshest attacks at that first show, yet the term Impressionist quickly won favour with the public and the artists themselves. They were a varied group in style and temperament, unified mainly by a spirit of independence and rebellion. Between 1874 and 1886 they exhibited together eight times despite shifting membership. Monet, Sisley, Morisot, and Pissarro may be counted the purest Impressionists, consistent in their pursuit of spontaneity, sunlight, and colour. Degas rejected much of this, believing in the primacy of drawing over colour and belittling outdoor painting. Renoir turned away from Impressionism during the 1880s and never fully returned to its ideas. Manet, regarded as the group's leader, never gave up his liberal use of black, never joined the exhibitions, and kept submitting to the Salon, where his Spanish Singer had won a 2nd class medal in 1861. He urged the others to do the same, calling the Salon the real field of battle where a reputation could be made. The disagreements ran deep. Bazille had died in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. When Degas insisted on including realists like Jean-François Raffaëlli and Ludovic Lepic, Monet accused the group in 1880 of opening doors to first-come daubers. The seventh exhibition in 1882 was the most selective, with only nine true Impressionists, while Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight.

• 6. How They Painted

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  Short, thick strokes of paint were the heart of the technique, capturing the essence of a subject rather than its details, often applied thickly as impasto. Colours sat side by side with as little mixing as possible, exploiting simultaneous contrast to make them appear more vivid. Greys and dark tones came from mixing complementary colours, and pure Impressionism avoided black paint. Wet paint went into wet paint without waiting for layers to dry, producing softer edges and intermingled colour. The Impressionists discarded the careful glazes of earlier painters in favour of an opaque surface, and they worked on white or light-coloured grounds where predecessors had used dark grey or strongly coloured ones. Natural light was emphasised above all, with close attention to how colours reflected from object to object. Painters worked in the evening to produce effets de soir, the shadowy effects of twilight, and they painted shadows boldly with the blue of the sky reflected onto surfaces. Blue shadows on snow inspired the approach. New technology helped. Premixed paints in tin tubes, introduced mid-century, let artists work spontaneously indoors and out, replacing the old habit of grinding pigment with linseed oil and storing it in animal bladders. Vivid synthetic pigments like cobalt blue, viridian, cadmium yellow, and synthetic ultramarine were in use by the 1840s, joined by cerulean blue in the 1860s.

• 7. The Modern Eye

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  Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day of 1877 captured the isolation of individuals among the outsized buildings and spaces of the modern city. The Impressionists explored non-academic subjects: middle-class leisure, train stations, cafés, the theater, and dance. The newly widened avenues of Paris offered bustling crowds, popular entertainments, and nocturnal lighting to depict. When they painted landscapes, they did not hesitate to include the factories spreading through the countryside, which earlier painters had avoided as blights unworthy of art. Photography reshaped how they saw. As cameras became more portable, photographs grew more candid, and the Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so a painting often resembled a snapshot, a slice of reality caught as if by chance. Rather than compete with the camera's lifelike reproduction, they pursued the one thing it could not offer, the subjectivity of the image, expressing their perception of nature rather than exact representation. Japanese ukiyo-e prints were another major influence. Monet's Jardin à Sainte-Adresse of 1867, with its bold blocks of colour and strong diagonal slant, shows that debt. Degas, both an avid photographer and a collector of Japanese prints, combined both in his The Dance Class of 1874, where dancers seem caught off guard in awkward poses and an expanse of empty floor opens in the lower right.

• 8. The Women Impressionists

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  Marie Bracquemond gave up painting because of a husband resentful of her work, a fate that captures the limits women faced in the movement. Female Impressionists shared the same ideals of depicting visual experience and contemporary life, but they were barred from the bourgeois world of the boulevard, café, and dance hall, both as imagery and as the meeting places where male Impressionists formed and shared their ideas. In the academic world women were believed incapable of complex subjects, and excelling in art was thought unladylike, since a woman's true talents were said to lie in homemaking and mothering. The four best known were Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, and Berthe Morisot, often called the Women Impressionists. Their participation across the eight exhibitions varied. Morisot took part in seven, Cassatt in four, Bracquemond in three, and Gonzalès in none. Critics lumped them together regardless of personal style, acknowledging their talent while confining it within a narrow notion of femininity. Cassatt kept her female figures from objectification, showing them reading, conversing, sewing, or lost in thought. These women were largely left out of art historical textbooks until Tamar Garb's Women Impressionists appeared in 1986; Jean Leymarie's Impressionism of 1955 had included none of them. The painter Androniqi Zengo Antoniu is co-credited with bringing Impressionism to Albania.