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. As an organized movement, Impressionism was purely a French phenomenon, but many of its ideas and practices were adopted in other countries, and by the turn of the century it was a dominant influence on avant-garde art in Europe (and also in the USA and Australia). In essence, its effect was to undermine the authority of large, formal, highly finished paintings in favour of works that more immediately expressed the artist's personality and response to the world.

The nucleus of the Impressionist group was formed in the 1860s, and the name was coined facetiously by a reviewer of the first joint exhibition, held in Paris in 1874. Seven more Impressionist exhibitions followed, the last in 1886, by which time the group was beginning to lose its cohesion (it was in any case never formally structured). The central figures (in alphabetical order) were Paul Cézanne; Edgar Degas; Édouard Manet (1832–83), although he never exhibited in the group shows; Claude Monet; Camille Pissarro; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; and Alfred Sisley (1839–99). The minor figures included Armand Guillaumin, who was the last survivor of those who showed in the 1874 exhibition, dying in 1927, the year after Monet. These painters differed from each other in many ways, but they were united 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.

The Impressionists were at first generally received with suspicion, bewilderment, or abuse (although the critical response was not as one-sided as is sometimes suggested). To most observers, their vigorous brushwork looked sloppy and unfinished, and their colours seemed garish and unnatural. Among conservative artists and critics, this continued to be the prevailing view for many years. For example, when the painter Gustave Caillebotte (1848–94) left his superb Impressionist collection to the French nation, the academic painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérome (1824–1904) wrote that ‘For the Government to accept such filth, there would have to be a great moral slackening', and at about the same time in England, Sir Edward Poynter expressed a similar disdain, although in more temperate language. In more sympathetic circles, however, the Impressionists began achieving substantial success in the 1880s (helped by the dedicated promotion of Durand-Ruel), and during the 1890s their influence began to be 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. The support of critics such as Julius Meier-Graefe in Germany and George Moore and Frank Rutter in Britain was important in increasing awareness and understanding of the movement (the first book on Impressionism in English, published in 1903, was a translation of a work by the French critic Camille Mauclair; the first book on the subject actually written in English appeared a year later—Impressionist Painting: Its Genesis and Development by the British landscape painter Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941), who knew Monet and corresponded with Pissarro).

Outside France, it was perhaps in the USA that Impressionism was most eagerly adopted, both by painters such as Childe Hassam and the other members of The Ten and by collectors ( Mary Cassatt helped to develop the taste among her wealthy picture-buying friends). It also made a significant impact in Australia, with Tom Roberts playing the leading role in its introduction. In Britain, Sickert and Steer are generally regarded as the main channels through which Impressionism influenced the country's art, but the differences between their work shows how broadly and imprecisely the term has been used (at the time, D. S. MacColl commented that it was applied to ‘any new painting that surprised or annoyed the critics or public'). For a few years around 1890, Steer painted in a sparklingly fresh Impressionist manner, but his style later became more sober; Sickert adopted the broken brushwork of Impressionism (as did his followers in the Camden Town Group), but he used much more subdued colour, and he had a taste for quirky, distinctively English subject-matter. In contrast, the painters of the Newlyn School often painted out of doors in conscious imitation of the French and used comparatively high-keyed colour, but they generally did not adopt Impressionist brushwork. Accordingly, many authorities think that among British artists, only Steer—and he only briefly—can be considered a ‘pure’ Impressionist.

In addition to prompting imitation and adaptation, Impressionism also inspired various counter-reactions—indeed its influence was so great that much of the history of late 19th-century and early 20th-century painting is the story of its aftermath. 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 that they thought the Impressionists had sacrificed through concentrating so strongly on the fleeting and the casual.