Impressionism

Impressionism. A movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had an enormous impact on Western art over the following half-century. The Impressionists were not a formal group with clearly defined principles and aims; rather they were a loose association of artists linked by some community of outlook who banded together for the purpose of exhibiting. The central figures were (in alphabetical order) Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley. Monet, Renoir, and Sisley met as students, and the others came into contact with them through the artistic café society of Paris. There were friendly ties of varied degrees of intimacy linking each of them to most of the others, but Degas and even more Manet were set somewhat apart because they came from a higher stratum of society than the others, and the artists' commitment to Impressionism varied considerably (Manet was much respected as a senior figure, but he never exhibited with the group). They were united, however, in rebelling against academic conventions to try to depict their surroundings with spontaneity and freshness, capturing an ‘impression’ of what the eye sees at a particular moment, rather than a detailed record of appearances. Their archetypal subject was landscape (and painting out of doors, directly from nature, was one of the key characteristics of the movement), but they treated many other subjects, notably ones involving everyday city life. Degas, for example, made subjects such as horse races, dancers, and laundresses his own, and Renoir is famous for his pictures of pretty women and children.

The Impressionists' desire to look at the world with a new freshness and immediacy was encouraged by photography and by scientific research into colour and light. In trying to capture the effects of light on varied surfaces, particularly in open-air settings, they transformed painting, using bright colours and sketchy brushwork that seemed bewildering or shocking to traditionalists. The name ‘Impressionism’, in fact, was coined derisively, when it was applied to a picture by Monet, Impression: Sunrise (1872, Mus. Marmottan, Paris), which was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris in 1874. There were seven more Impressionist exhibitions(1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886), and after the final one the group broke up, only Monet continuing to pursue Impressionist ideals rigorously. Although the Impressionists at first had a generally hostile reception and several of them endured great financial hardship early in their careers, they began to achieve substantial success in the 1880s (helped by the dedicated promotion of Durand-Ruel) and during the 1890s their influence was widely felt. Few artists outside France adopted Impressionism wholesale, but many lightened their palettes and loosened their brushwork as they synthesized its ideas with their local traditions. Indeed its impact was so enormous that much of the history of late 19th-century and early 20th-century painting is the story of developments from it or reactions against it. The Neo-Impressionists, for example, tried to give the optical principles of Impressionism a scientific basis, and the Post-Impressionists began a long series of movements that attempted to free colour and line from purely representational functions. Similarly, the Symbolists wanted to restore the emotional values they thought the Impressionists had sacrificed by concentrating so strongly on the fleeting and the casual.