impressionism

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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 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, most of them having had difficulty in getting their work accepted for the official Salon (they held eight group shows, all in Paris, in 1874, 1876, 1877, 1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, and 1886). The main figures involved were (in alphabetical order) Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley; Berthe Morisot, too, played a central role in the movement. Frédéric Bazille was part of the original nucleus but died tragically early in 1870; the minor figures included Armand Guillaumin, who was the last survivor of those who showed in the 1874 exhibition, dying in 1927. 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.

In trying to capture the effects of light on varied surfaces, particularly in open-air settings, the Impressionists transformed painting, using bright colours and sketchy brushwork that seemed bewildering or shocking to traditionalists. The name ‘Impressionism’, in fact, was coined derisively, when the painter and critic Louis Leroy (1812–85) latched onto a picture by Monet, Impression: Sunrise (1872, Mus. Marmottan, Paris), at the group's first exhibition, heading his abusive review ‘Exposition des Impressionistes’ (Le Charivari, 25 Apr. 1874); he dismissed the group as a whole as ‘hostile to good manners, to devotion to form, and to respect for the masters’. Although the critical response to the Impressionists was not as one-sided as is sometimes suggested, Leroy's attitude prevailed in conservative circles for many years; for example, when Gustave Caillebotte left his superb Impressionist collection to the French nation in 1894, Jean-Léon Gérôme wrote that ‘For the Government to accept such filth, there would have to be a great moral slackening.’ However, by the the time of the final exhibition in 1886 the Impressionists as a whole were starting to achieve critical praise and financial success (helped by the dedicated promotion of Durand-Ruel), and during the 1890s their influence began to be widely felt (by this time the group had broken up and only Monet continued to pursue Impressionist ideals rigorously).

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. It was perhaps in the USA that it 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.

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.

impressionism in painting, late-19th-century French school that was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of pure, broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity. It was loosely structured in that many painters were associated with the movement for only brief periods in their careers. Their association often came about more for the purpose of exhibiting their works than from an approach to painting held in common.

The Birth of Impressionism

The movement began with the friendship of four students of the academic painter Marc Gleyre: Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille. These four met regularly at the Café Guerbois in Paris with Cézanne, Pissarro, and Morisot, and later with Degas, Manet, the critics Duret and Rivière, and the art dealer Durand-Ruel. The painters repudiated academic standards and reacted against the romantics' emphasis on emotion as subject matter. They forsook literary and anecdotal subjects and, indeed, rejected the role of imagination in the creation of works of art. Instead they observed nature closely, with a scientific interest in visual phenomena. Although they painted everyday subjects, they avoided the vulgar and ugly, seeking visual realism by extraordinary stylistic means.

Impressionists and Postimpressionists

The subject matter of their painting was as diverse as the various artists' personalities: Manet chose Old Master themes which he treated in a novel and stunningly direct way so that his canvases were the focus of acid controversy and scandal. Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro were the most consistently impressionist in style. Their subject was landscape and the changing effects of light. Degas painted horse races, the ballet, and portraits of ordinary people, all with a photographic sense of "accidental" composition. Renoir, painting his idealized women and children and his lush landscapes, developed divisionism; omitting black for shadows and outlines from his palette in the 1860s, he used pure, bright color to separate forms. Monet painted many series of the same subject at different times of day so that the character of light became his subject and the forms of objects seemed to dissolve, as in the series of Rouen Cathedral.

The interests and attitudes of these painters influenced the postimpressionists Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Toulouse-Lautrec gained from a study of Degas's paintings; Matisse, Vuillard, and Bonnard all owed a debt to the landscape painters. However, impressionist objectivity was limiting; the severe and total rejection of both the function of imagination and of the enduring aspects of reality began to pall. Gauguin and Van Gogh used color imaginatively and violently for its expressive emotional value. Immediate impressions and flickering light gave way to heavier subjects, solid with "meaning," in the works of the impressionists' successors.

See postimpressionism and articles on individual artists, e.g., Renoir .

The Legacy of Impressionism

Impressionism and postimpressionism ran their course and produced aesthetic revolution from within and without, putting hosts of painters to come greatly in its debt. At first, with a few exceptions, the works of the impressionist and postimpressionist schools were received with hostility from critics and public alike. This situation continued until the 1920s. By the 1930s impressionism had a large cult following, so that in the 1950s even the least works by painters associated with the movement commanded large prices.

Throughout the next three decades, impressionism and postimpressionism became increasingly popular, as evidenced by the major exhibitions of Monet and Van Gogh at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the 1980s, both of which drew enormous crowds. Record prices to date include two 1990 sales, one at Sotheby's of Renoir's Au Moulin de la Galette for $78.1 million, the other at Christie's of Van Gogh's Portrait du Dr. Gachet for $82.5 million.

Bibliography

See J. Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1980); T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (1984); W. H. Gerdts, American Impressionism (1984); D. Bomford et al., Impressionism (1990); B. Denvir, Encyclopedia of Impressionism (1990); C. Moffett, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (1991).

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.

Impressionism, aesthetic movement in which the artist attempts to present the impressions an object makes upon him, rather than a realistic version of the object itself. Impressionists are thus more concerned with moods or sensations than with the observation of details. The name derives from the French school of painting of the late 19th century, whose exponents included Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and which was brought to the U.S. by such painters as J.A. Weir, Maurice Prendergast, and Childe Hassam, who were similarly concerned with transitory effects of light and with capturing a momentary luminous atmosphere. Their theories were taken up by writers, especially Baudelaire and other followers of Poe, and Symbolists such as Mallarmé, who attempted to capture the fleeting impressions of a moment, or held that the personal attitudes and moods of an author were more important than any objective depiction of character, setting, and action. In music, the leading impressionist is Debussy, whose American followers include such composers as Griffes and Loeffler. Impressionistic art was most influential at the end of the 19th century and during the early decades of the 20th, when its leading proponents in American criticism included Huneker, Vance Thompson, and G.J. Nathan. In poetry the movement is exemplified in such authors as Pound, Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, who were influenced by a mingling of trends, including Imagism. Impressionists in prose include such diverse writers as Van Vechten, Huneker, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings, and Thomas Beer. Expressionism is both an extension and a negation of this point of view.

impressionism Major French anti-academic art movement of the late 19th century, gaining its name from a painting by Monet entitled Impression, Sunrise (1874). In the words of Monet, the movement's leading painter, impressionists aimed to create “a spontaneous work rather than a calculated one”. In the 1860s, Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Frédéric Bazille formed a close-knit group exploring the possibilities of painting outdoors and closely analysing and interpreting the effects of light on nature. The first impressionist exhibition took place in 1874. Although not accepted at first, Impressionism became widely influential from the late 1880s and spread throughout Europe. Degas and Pissarro were prominent Impressionists and Cézanne exhibited with them twice. Manet was influenced by, and in turn influenced, Impressionism. Other Impressionists include Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Rodin has been called Impressionist because of his interest in the effects of light on his sculpture. In music, the term Impressionism refers to a period lasting from roughly 1890 to 1930, and is usually applied to the work of Claude Debussy. It tends to be subtle and atmospheric rather than overtly emotional. Many composers were influenced by Debussy, including Maurice Ravel and Frederick Delius. See also Romanticism

impressionism. Term used in graphic art from 1874 to describe the work of Monet, Degas, Whistler, Renoir, etc., whose paintings avoid sharp contours but convey an ‘impression’ of the scene painted by means of blurred outlines and minute small detail. It was applied by musicians to the mus. of Debussy and his imitators because they interpret their subjects (e.g. La Mer) in a similar impressionistic manner, conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone-picture. To describe Debussy's harmony and orchestration as impressionist in the sense of vague or ill-defined is to do them a severe injustice. Some of the technical features of musical impressionism included new chord combinations, often ambiguous as to tonality, chords of the 9th, 11th, and 13th being used instead of triads and chords of the 7th; appoggiaturas used as part of the chord, with full chord included; parallel movement in a group of chords of triads, 7ths, and 9ths, etc.; whole-tone chords; exotic scales; use of the modes; and extreme chromaticism.

impressionism in music, a French movement in the late 19th and early 20th cent. It was begun by Debussy in reaction to the dramatic and dynamic emotionalism of romantic music, especially that of Wagner. Reflecting the impressionist schools of French painting and letters, Debussy developed a style in which atmosphere and mood take the place of strong emotion or of the story in program music. He used new chord combinations, whole-tone chords, chromaticism, and exotic rhythms and scales. In place of the usual harmonic progression, he developed a style in which chords are valued for their individual sonorities rather than for their relations to one another, and dissonances are unprepared and unresolved. Although conceived in reaction to romanticism, musical impressionism seems today the culmination of romanticism. Its influence was widespread and is evident in the music of Ravel, Dukas, Respighi, Albéniz, de Falla, Delius, C. T. Griffes, and J. A. Carpenter.

Bibliography: See C. Palmer, Impressionism in Music (1973).

Im·pres·sion·ism / imˈpreshəˌnizəm/ • n. a style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, esp. in terms of the shifting effect of light and color. ∎  a literary or artistic style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve accurate depiction. ∎ Mus. a style of composition (associated esp. with Debussy) in which clarity of structure and theme is subordinate to harmonic effects, characteristically using the whole-tone scale.

Impressionism, the name given in derision (from a painting by Monet called Impression: soleil levant) to the work of a group of French painters who held their first exhibition in 1874. Their aim was to render the effects of light on objects rather than the objects themselves. Claude Monet (1840–1926), Alfred Sisley (1839–99), and Camille Pissarro (1831–1903) carried out their aims most completely. The term is used by transference in literature and music.

Impressionism a style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, especially in terms of the shifting effect of light and colour. The Impressionist painters repudiated both the precise academic style and the emotional concerns of Romanticism, and their interest in objective representation, especially of landscape, was influenced by early photography.