The birth of a name: a jibe that became a label
On 15 April 1874, a group of painters rejected by the official Salons organised an independent exhibition at the photographer Nadar's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Thirty artists showed 165 works. The critic Louis Leroy, writing in Le Charivari, published a withering review mocking a painting by Monet titled Impression, Sunrise: "Impression — I knew it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it."
The painters, far from taking offence, seized on the word. They renamed themselves "Impressionists" and made it their identity. It is one of the rare cases in art history where a movement was named by its adversaries and adopted as a badge of honour by its members.
The technical characteristics of Impressionism
Impressionism is first and foremost a way of painting, not a subject matter. Its technical characteristics represent a clear break with academic painting:
Visible brushwork. Instead of blending colours on the palette to achieve smooth, finished tones, the Impressionists applied short, visible, sometimes separate strokes directly to the canvas. The blending happens in the viewer's eye, at a certain distance.
Plein air. The Impressionists painted outdoors, directly in front of the motif — a practice made possible by the invention of metal paint tubes (1841), which allowed paint to be transported without preparing it on site.
The light of the moment. What interested the Impressionists was light at a precise instant — morning, evening, in rain, in fog. Monet would paint the same Rouen Cathedral more than thirty times to capture its changing light at different hours and seasons.
The dissolution of outline. In academic painting, objects are defined by sharp contours. The Impressionists dissolved those contours in light — a green meadow merges into a blue sky, a face is lost in the shadow of a hat.
The major painters of the movement
Claude Monet (1840–1926) is the father of the movement and its most radical practitioner. His series — Haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, Water Lilies — push the study of light to the threshold of abstraction. The Water Lilies at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, painted when Monet was nearly blind, represent the ultimate destination of his vision.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) is the painter of the good life — dances, bathing parties, portraits of women and children in sunlight. His style is more sensuous and warmer than Monet's, his palette more golden.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917) is the most atypical of the group: he painted mainly in the studio, was as interested in line as in light, and chose subjects from modern life — Opera dancers, jockeys, café-concerts. He called himself a "realist."
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), born in the Caribbean, was the elder of the group and its spiritual father. He is the only one to have participated in all eight Impressionist exhibitions. Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), English but living in France, devoted himself almost exclusively to landscape. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) were the two women of the group, both depicting bourgeois interior life with great subtlety.
The eight exhibitions: a decade of struggle
Between 1874 and 1886, the group held eight independent exhibitions. Their popularity grew gradually, despite persistent ridicule from academic critics. In 1877, they fully embraced the name "Impressionist" for their third exhibition. In 1886, the eighth and final exhibition marked the end of the collective movement: the members drifted apart, each developing in a different direction.
That same year, 1886, the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel organised a major Impressionist exhibition in New York that met with considerable success. America would become one of the main markets for Impressionist painting — and American museums today hold some of the finest collections in the world.
The legacy: from Cézanne to abstract art
Impressionism is not an end but a beginning. Paul Cézanne, who took part in the early exhibitions, drew radically different conclusions from it: he sought the structure beneath the light, the geometry beneath the impression. His way of simplifying forms into planes of colour opened the door to the Cubism of Picasso and Braque. Van Gogh radicalised the visible brushstroke into pure emotional expression. Gauguin abandoned fidelity to nature for symbolic colour. Seurat systematised the brushstroke into calculated dots (Pointillism).
All of them started from Impressionism and moved beyond it — that is the very definition of Post-Impressionism. And at the end of that chain lies the abstract art of the twentieth century, which inherited the fundamental lesson of Monet: colour and light have their own reality, independent of what they represent.