Impressionism Simplified
Impressionism is a late-nineteenth-century painting style that began in France. Impressionist paintings include realistic subjects and are produced in a broad, fast way with obvious brushstrokes and vibrant colours.
Summary of Impressionism
Impressionism is arguably the most influential trend in contemporary painting. In the 1860s, a group of young artists decided to depict what they saw, thought, and felt. They were preoccupied with artistic perfection and were disinterested in painting history, mythology, or the lives of great men. Instead, as its name implies, the Impressionists sought to capture on canvas a “impression” of how a scene, object, or person seemed to them at a certain moment in time. This often meant painting outdoors, en plein air, with much lighter and looser brushwork than earlier artists had employed.
The Impressionists also refused to participate in official exhibitions and painting competitions organised by the French government, choosing instead to stage their own group shows, which were first greeted with disdain by the general public. All of these events heralded the emergence of contemporary art and avant-garde thought in general.
The Impressionists used a looser brushwork style and softer colours than earlier painters. They ignored conventional three-dimensional perspective and form clarity, which had previously helped to distinguish the more significant from the less important elements of an image. As a consequence, several reviewers criticised Impressionist works for their unfinished appearance and amateurish quality.
The Impressionists wanted to be realism painters, emulating Gustave Courbet’s ideas. They sought to expand the variety of subjects that might be shown in paintings. They shifted their emphasis away from idealised forms and perfect symmetry, instead concentrating on the world as they saw it, which was imperfect in a number of ways.
Scientific thinking was starting to realise that what the eye saw and what the brain understood were two different things throughout the Impressionist period. The Impressionists tried to portray the former – light’s optical effects – in order to convey the fleeting nature of the current moment, which included environmental factors such as weather changes, in their paintings. They were not obliged to use realistic depictions in their work.
Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s enormous mid-nineteenth-century reconstruction of Paris, which featured the city’s newly built railway stations, broad, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the city’s formerly small, congested streets, and big, luxury apartment complexes, is captured in Impressionism. Scenes of public recreation, especially cafés and cabarets, were often portrayed in works that reflected the inhabitants of the first modern city’ new feeling of estrangement.
Why is it Called Impressionism
Impressionist artists were not trying to portray a person, light, atmosphere, object, or scene in a realistic manner, but rather to make a ‘impression’ of how the person, light, atmosphere, object, or landscape seemed to them. It’s for this reason why they’re known as impressionists!
The Impressionist movement began when critic Louis Leroy claimed that Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) was just a sketch or “impression,” rather than a complete painting.
Everything About Impressionism
The Beginnings
Impressionism has its roots in previous schools of painting, such as Realism and Naturalism, which were revolutionary movements that questioned traditional notions of aesthetic beauty and the artist’s relationship with the state.
The Realism movement, headed by Gustave Courbet, was the first to question the official Parisian art establishment in the mid-nineteenth century. Courbet was an anarchist who felt that at the time, art was oblivious to the realities of life.
A brutal dictatorship ruled the French, and the bulk of the people was impoverished. Instead than depicting such circumstances, artists of the period concentrated on idealised nudes, classical and mythological subjects, and glorifying depictions of nature. As a gesture of protest, Courbet sponsored a show of his work directly opposite the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1855, a daring action that encouraged other artists wanting to challenge the status quo.
Simultaneously, the emergence of Naturalism, a closely related trend to Realism, showed how art might utilise the natural world as its subject matter without resorting to historical or mythological heroics. Since the 1820s, artists like as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet have been drawing trees, landscapes, and rural working classes en plein air in the Barbizon Forest south of Paris. The Barbizon School started a worldwide trend in painting that aimed to depict the natural world in all of its unadulterated glory while also honouring the lives of rural labourers.
While Naturalism varies from Impressionism in its frequent focus on hyperreal detail – as seen in much of Jules Bastien’s work – the Impressionists’ appreciation of the natural world for its own sake, as well as their use of plein air technique, owe a great deal to the older Naturalist ethos.
A large number of artists were refused admission to the official annual art salon, the most important event in the French art world, in 1863, sparking widespread anger. In response, the Salon des Refusés (“Salon of the Refused”) was founded the same year to enable artists who had previously been refused entrance to the main salon to exhibit their work. Among the artists on exhibit were Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, James Whistler, and Édouard Manet.
Even though it was sanctioned by Emperor Napoleon III to appease the artists involved, the 1863 exhibition was highly controversial with the public due to the unconventional themes and styles of works such as Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), which featured clothed men and naked women enjoying an afternoon picnic (these women were not classical nudes, but modern women – possibly prostitutes – in a state of undress whose connotations were far more explicitly sexual).
Édouard Manet was a founding member of the Parisian public exhibition scene and one of its most important figures. Despite his boyhood admiration for the Old Masters, he started to mix a new, looser painting technique with a brighter palette in the early 1860s. He also started focusing on scenes from everyday life, such as cafés, boudoirs, and streets. His anti-academic approach and distinctively contemporary subject matter soon attracted the attention of fringe artists and sparked a new style of painting that challenged the norms of the day.
Olympia (1863), which, like Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, depicts a modern female nude assertively addressing the audience, encouraged the fledgling Impressionist group to show subjects hitherto considered unworthy of art.
Cafés in Paris were among the most popular gathering locations for the artists of the fledgling Impressionist movement. From 1866 forward, Manet frequented the Café Guerbois in Montmartre. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro all visited the café, with Caillebotte and Bazille having studios nearby and often attending the meetings. Other people were attracted to this group, including writers, critics, and photographers.
The group’s interest was aroused by the dynamic variety of personalities, economic circumstances, and political views. Berthe Morisot, Gustave Caillebotte, and Edgar Degas were born into the upper class, while Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro were from merchant or working-class backgrounds. Mary Cassatt was American and Alfred Sisley was Anglo-French (and a woman). This diversity of personalities may explain why the group’s joint efforts resulted in so much creativity.
Because they were fed up with the restrictive academic standards of fine art, the group decided to form a commercial cooperative named the Anonymous Society of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, Etcetera, even though they were not yet united by a single style. Because the artists’ financial success was limited and only a few of their paintings were chosen for the salon shows in Paris, the business was crucial in ensuring their financial stability and creative independence. In 1874, they held the first in a series of exhibitions at photographer Felix Nadar’s studio. It wasn’t until the third exhibition, in 1877, that they began referring to themselves as The Impressionists.
While their first exhibition attracted little attention, and the bulk of their eight exhibits cost the organisation money rather than earning money, their later exhibitions drew huge audiences, with attendance figures in the thousands. Despite the attention, the bulk of the members of the group sold relatively few works, and many of them remained poor throughout the time.
Photographic science had a significant role in Impressionism. The Daguerreotype, invented in Paris in 1839 by French inventor Louis Daguerre, was a watershed moment in the development of this media, which spanned many nations. Daguerre had developed a technique for putting pictures of the world onto a silver-coated copper sheet that reacted to light. This enabled a direct image of reality to be imprinted on a two-dimensional surface, a technique that revolutionised people’s ability to visually record the world and their own lives. Each year, 100,000 Parisians had their pictures taken by 1849.
Photographic influence on Impressionism may be split into two groups. On the one hand, it shifted people’s perceptions of what was worthy of being photographed. In the past, mythical and historical themes, as well as portraits of national leaders and heroes, dominated academic painting in France. Photography, on the other hand, allowed for the visual preservation of a wide range of people, situations, structures, and landscapes. As a result, some painters’ views of who and what merited their attention shifted; Impressionist paintings show not just a more vibrant urban scene, but also a new thought that this world was worth preserving.
Photography, on the other hand, taught artists how to compose spontaneously as well as the idea that a photograph might represent both a moment in time and a place in space. Degas’ Location de la Concorde is a painting depicting the place, as well as the people and animals that happened to be travelling through it, at a certain point in time. Only via contact with technology capable of freezing and visually transmitting a millisecond of time could the random arrangement of people in motion in this and many other Impressionist paintings have been learned.
There was a less distinct sense of what the world could seem like in this temporally specific position prior to the science of photographic reproduction.
Concepts in Impressionism
One of the most well-known Impressionist artists is Claude Monet. He was renowned for his mastery of natural light, painting at several times of the day to represent changing conditions. He created a subtle sense of vibration on the canvas using extremely delicate brushstrokes and unmixed colours, as if nature itself was alive on the painting. He didn’t wait for the paint to dry before applying further layers, resulting in softer edges and hazy boundaries that suggested rather than accurately represented three-dimensional planes.
Plein air painting was a popular technique among the Impressionists, thanks to Monet’s popularisation. This method, which was passed down from Barbizon School landscape painters, resulted in improvements in the depiction of light and time, two essential aspects of Impressionist painting. While Monet is often recognised as the founder of plein air painting, other painters such as Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Sisley, and others also painted outdoors to capture the transitory aspect of the world.
Others, like Edgar Degas, were less interested in painting outdoors and rejected the idea of painting as a spontaneous act. Interior scenes of contemporary life, such as people sitting in cafés, musicians in an orchestra pit, and ballet dancers going through the motions during rehearsal, appealed to Degas, a gifted draughtsman and portraitist. In comparison to Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, he also employed rougher lines and thicker brushstrokes to define his forms more clearly.
Others, like as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt, were equally fascinated with the human form and the psychology of the sitter or protagonist. Renoir’s paintings were known for their vibrant, saturated colours and depicted the everyday lives of people in his Montmartre neighbourhood, especially the social delights of Parisian society. While Renoir, like Morisot and Cassatt, painted outdoors, he concentrated on the physiognomy and emotional elements of his subjects rather than the scene’s climatic conditions, using light and loose brushwork to emphasise the human form.
Berthe Morisot concentrated on the private lives of women in late-nineteenth-century society, unlike the male Impressionists who mainly portrayed people in a public setting. She was the first woman to exhibit among the Impressionists, producing rich compositions that emphasise the domestic, deeply intimate realm of feminine society, often emphasising the maternal bond between mother and child, as in The Cradle (1872). With Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond, she is one of the four major female figures in the Impressionist movement.
Cassatt was an American painter who moved to Paris in 1866 and became a member of the Impressionist movement in 1879. She depicted women in both the private world of the home and the public spaces of the newly modernised city, as she did in her masterwork At the Opera (1879). Her paintings include a number of firsts, including the flattening of three-dimensional space and the use of bright, even garish colours, both of which foreshadowed later developments in modern art.
Because Impressionism was deeply entrenched in Parisian culture, it was heavily influenced by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1860s. The urban project, also known as “Haussmannization,” sought to modernise the city by creating broad boulevards that functioned as social hubs. As a consequence of the city’s renovation, the concept of the flâneur emerged: an idler or lounger who walks the city’s public spaces, watching life but remaining detached from the crowd.
Gustave Caillebotte, a later proponent of the Impressionist style, concentrated on panoramic views of the city and the psychology of its inhabitants, and his art reflected these metropolitan themes. Caillebotte’s paintings, such as Paris, Rainy Day (1877), show a flaneur in his characteristic black coat and top hat strolling over the vast expanse of the street while gazing at people, illustrating the artist’s response to the changing nature of society.
Other Impressionists, such as Monet in Boulevard des Capucines (1873) and Pissarro in The Boulevard Montmarte, Afternoon, caught the fleeting nature of movement and light inside the city (1897). Similarly, these works emphasise the mathematical organisation of public space via the exact demarcation of buildings, trees, and roads. Using rough brushstrokes and impressionistic streaks of colour, the Impressionists portrayed the rapid speed of modern life as a significant element of late-nineteenth-century urban society.
The End of Impressionism
Despite their diversity, the Impressionists gathered on a regular basis to discuss and exhibit their work. The ensemble collaborated on eight performances between 1874 and 1886, but they were progressively disbanding as a collective. Many artists felt they had mastered the early, experimental styles that had garnered them attention and desired to go into new terrain. Others, worried by their work’s continued economic failure, changed their artistic orientation in order to increase sales or patronage.
A French art dealer named Paul Durand-Ruel, who resided in London, was largely responsible for the Impressionist movement’s ultimate acceptance. In 1871, Monet met Durand-Ruel, who purchased Impressionist paintings and exhibited them for many years in London. Despite low sales, he started exhibiting Impressionist works in the United States in the late 1880s, and his success grew. After showing in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, Durand-Ruel was able to attract an audience of American buyers who purchased more Impressionist paintings than were ever sold in France during the next few years.
Impressionist artworks skyrocketed in value, and Monet became a millionaire. Furthermore, Impressionism came perilously close to becoming an academic orthodoxy, with a group of American painters gathering to Monet’s house in Giverny to learn from the movement’s founder.
Meanwhile, a new generation has learned the teachings of the style. If Manet bridged the Realism-Impressionism gap, Paul Cézanne did the same for Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Cézanne absorbed a lot of Impressionist technique, but he developed a more methodical way of handling paint and, toward the end of his life, paid more attention to the form of the figures he depicted with broad, repetitive brushstrokes. He reportedly stated, “redo Poussin after nature and make Impressionism something solid and durable like the Old Masters.”
The impact of Impressionism was so powerful that its younger followers broke away in a number of ways, resulting in a swarm of sometimes short-lived groups and schools. However, the development of Post-Impressionism may have been fueled by a fundamental split. On the one hand, artists and schools emphasised the use of colour and brushstrokes to depict the painter’s mental and emotional life rather than the pure visual impressions given by pioneers such as Monet. Others, on the other hand, sought to define and refine the early Impressionist style’s optical processes.
Individual artists whose styles were never completely linked down to a specific grouping, probably most famously Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, as well as groups like the Cloissonists, Synthetists, and Nabis, are included in the first camp. Cloisonnism initially emerged in the late 1880s, and it is generally credited to the painters Émile Bernard and Louis Anquetin. In their work from this period, large bands of brilliant colour are separated by thick black borders, evoking the individual panels or “cloisonnes” of mediaeval stained-glass windows.
Both artists knew Van Gogh and were members of the Pont-Aven school of rural Brittany painters, which included Paul Sérusier and, for a time, Paul Gauguin. Synthetism, whose methods and origins are almost similar to Cloisonnism, is also linked with Serusier, Gauguin, Bernard, and Anquetin, but Synthetism is less associated with Cloisonnist works’ thick outlines.
The Vision of Gauguin The Sermon (1888) and Sérusier’s The Talisman (1888), the latter of which served as a launching pad for the Nabi group, whose works fused Cloisonnism’s bright, emotive block colours with a new depth of religious and psychological symbolism, are among the most iconic works associated with the Cloisonnist-Synthetist style. At this point, post-story Impressionism starts to mix with other late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century genres such as Symbolism and Expressionism.
Pointillism’s adherents, such as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, were at the more serious, scientifically minded end of the Impressionism response spectrum. According to critic Peter H. Feist, these artists were heavily invested in advances in optics during the late nineteenth century, especially the discovery – also important to the Impressionists – that “colours reached the eye in the form of light of differing wavelengths, and were mixed in the eye to establish the colour that corresponded to the object seen”
According to the author, “if a painter juxtaposed tiny dots of unmixed primary colours in the right way, the eye would perceive them as the desired colour tone when looking from a certain distance; and that tone would appear lighter than if it had been mixed in a conventional way, on the palette or the canvas.” A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Seurat is the most famous example of Pointillism (1884-86). Van Gogh’s painting may be seen as a combination of Pointillism’s strong aesthetic characteristics with the Cloisonnist-Synthetist approach’s profound emotional appeal, with its conspicuous and hypnotically repeated brushwork.
Even when the Post-Impressionists’ achievements surpassed Impressionism in France, their impact extended across continents. One of the most well-known of the international Impressionist groupsings was the American Impressionist movement, which included painters such as William Merritt Chase, who applied Impressionist techniques to landscapes and the bourgeois, cosmopolitan milieu of late-nineteenth-century American society; Childe Hassam, known for his vivid coastal and city scenes; and Maurice Prende.
Another important school of Impressionism in the Anglophone world is the Australian Impressionist school, which is associated with the work of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, among others, as well as the dusty colour palettes of its Antipodean climate and scenery.
Particularly important was the late-nineteenth-century British Impressionist movement. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, an American expatriate in London, pioneered a free, fluid painting style that wonderfully depicted the gloom and splendour of dusk on the River Thames in his renowned Nocturne series. Meanwhile, the Impressionist seascape was associated with Philip Wilson Steer, especially with works focusing on the landscapes of Cornwall and the South-West of England, while William McTaggart, a Scot, painted stormier marine vistas evocative of his homeland’s harsher coastal surroundings.
Other important Impressionist schools developed throughout Europe, most notably in Germany, where Max Liebermann was a leading figure, as well as in Holland, Belgium, and Denmark.
Following the demise of the Post-Impressionist schools, many artists turned to Impressionism. Although the movement is not generally seen to have influenced Abstract Expressionism, there are notable similarities in the works of its artists. Jackson Pollock’s surface qualities, light suggestions, and “American Impressionist,” treatment of form all allude to the work of Claude Monet, who was often considered as a modern-day “all-over” painter.
The Op Art movement of the 1960s is often considered as a significant development on the underlying logic of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, with its focus on the so-called “Responsive Eye” (a term coined for the title of a famous 1964 Op Art show in New York). Bridget Riley, an avowed follower of George Seurat, based her oeuvre of visually stunning abstract paintings on the premise that static forms can be made to appear as if they are in motion based on certain arrangements of line, colour, and shape, just as the Impressionists had emphasised the difference between how colour is perceived by the eye and how it is processed by the brain.
While Impressionism was mainly a visual art movement, it inspired and was affected by a wide range of media and genres. They included music such as Claude Debussy’s and Maurice Ravel’s dreamy, romantic compositions, as well as literary prose. Émile Zola, a French writer, was not only a fervent admirer of the Impressionist painters, but he also applied a representative drive to his writing that was quite similar to Impressionism, trying to recreate the complexity of human perception and experience via his language.
Indeed, his works were produced at an era that almost exactly corresponds to the existence of the Impressionist movement. Unlike Impressionism, which attempted to portray the visual appearance of a particular place at a certain time, Zola’s literary approach, known as Naturalism, attempted to describe how the world seemed to a single person intellectually and emotionally.
Unlike Impressionism, which attempted to portray the visual appearance of a particular place at a certain time, Zola’s literary approach, known as Naturalism, attempted to describe how the world seemed to a single person intellectually and emotionally.
Zola provided an allegorical depiction of the Impressionist movement’s struggle in his book The Masterpiece, published in 1886. The storey follows a young artist in Paris who is attempting to gain recognition and acceptance for a bold new style, but is hampered by poverty and indifference. The storey is told in such a manner that the visual logic of Impressionism is translated into the realms of subjective experience, intellect, and emotion.
Key Art in Impressionism
Impression, Sunrise
By Claude Monet
1872
Sunrise by Claude Monet is sometimes credited as the work that launched the Impressionist movement, despite the fact that at the time it was painted, Monet was already one of a number of painters working in the new style. However, in a satirical review of the First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, critic Louis Leroy made disparaging remarks about the art and its label, which gave origin to the name “Impressionism” The name was coined as a joke in Leroy’s critique, but it was immediately adopted by the new school of artists in a spirit of pride and rebellion.
Fog, Voisins
By Alfred Sisley
1874
Alfred Sisley’s lovely pastoral picture has a soft colour palette, an evocation of calm and peace, and a concentration on the overall quality and ambience of a landscape rather than precise details and human shapes. The female heroine of this picture, picking flowers serenely, is nearly completely covered by the thick fog that blankets the field. The human form appears to be merged into the natural landscape, becoming both an element and expression of a larger natural universe, as in most of Sisley’s work.
Paris Street, Rainy Day
By Gustave Caillebotte
1877
While Gustave Caillebotte’s paintings have a decidedly Realist style, they also represent Impressionism’s fundamental concern with everyday life. The painting Paris Street, Rainy Day exemplifies this trend in Caillebotte’s work. The panoramic picture of a rainy street depicts the recently rebuilt Parisian metropolis, while the nameless individuals in the backdrop appear to embody the individual’s isolation inside the modern city. The indifferent stare of the masculine figure in the front, who embodies the cold detachment of the flâneur, poised in his trademark black coat and top hat, is the focal point of the picture.
Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge
By James Abbott McNeill Whistler
1872-1875
Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Gold is one of the Impressionist movement’s most brilliant masterpieces. It portrays the old Battersea Bridge in the south of the city from a riverside viewpoint, with the lights of the modern Albert Bridge flashing in the backdrop and rockets cascading from the sky. It was created during a period of urban rebuilding in London. It’s one of a series of Nocturne paintings that capture London’s evening atmosphere’s calm, beauty, and subtle dread. Whistler uses an Impressionist emphasis on individual, time-bound viewpoint in a situation that is vastly different from the Parisian school’s frantic street scenes.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
