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Impressionism
Artistic moyement that flourished in France from the 1860'S through the 1880'S. -
1874, a group of young independent painters-including Paul Cezanne, Edgar
Degas. Armand Guillaumin, Claude Monet. Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissaro. Pierre
Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley-constituted themselves the "Societe Anonyme"
and exhibited outside the official Parisian Salon in the studio of the photographer
Nadar The exhibition caused an uproar, and the journalist Louis Leroy, writing in
the April 25th issue of the satirical magazine Le Charivari, jeeringly called the
exhibitors "impressionists," after a canvas by Monet called Impression Sunrise .
This name, which was accepted by the painters themselves, soon became popular
and was universally adopted.
The Impressionist painters were all born between 1830 and 1841:
Pissarro, the eldest, in 1830; Edouard Manet in 1832; Degas in 1834; Cezanne and
Sisley in 1839; Monet in 1840; and Renoir, Frederic Bazille, Guillaumin, and Berthe
Morisot in 1841. These young innovators, who came from different environments,
met in Paris around 186o. Pissarro, Cezanne, and Guillaumin met at the Academie
Suisse; Monet, Renoir, Bazille, and Sisley at the Atelier Gleyre. They left the
confines of their respective Parisian art schools for the nearby forests of
Fontainebleau, where they began to paint in the naturalistic,
From there they went to the Seine estuary and the Channel beaches, where the
light-filled atmosphere and water-saturated air inspired Monet,
Manet , because of the modernity of his subject matter and his succes de scandale
in 1863 at the Salon des Refuses, became, perhaps in spite of himself, the standard
bearer of the young school that met at the Cafe Guerbois in Paris.
In 1869 Monet and Renoir, whose figures and compositions done in the open air
had been inspired by Gustave Courbet, painted together at Bougival, a small village
on the Seine. Each did several versions of the picturesque wharf of the
Grenouillere, which was always surrounded by a restless confusion of boats and
women in gaily colored dresses (Renoir, La Grenouillere,
In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 , Manet, Renoir, Degas, and Bazille (who was
killed ,e in battle) were called up and went to war; Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley took
refuge in London, Pissarro at Pontoise (Seine-et-Oise) began painting the new type
of open-air landscapes. monet worked on a grandiose, univversal scale and his
paintings, which were dominated by the spell of water and by the phantasms of light,
attracted Renoir, Sisley, and Manet; Pissarro's work, which was bucolic and earthy,
placed greater stress on structural values and influenced Cezanne and Guillaumin.
With the conversion of Manet, Cezanne, and, to a limited extent, Degas to
lightcolored painting in 1873, the Impressionist style spread and became more
generalIy tinderstood.
The painters of the group now applied the small brushstrokes they had already
used for reproducing reflections in water to trees, houses, sky, hills, and all the
various elements of the landscape. They systematically lightened their palettes and
actually used colors to create shadows. The transitional greys and browns that
Corot had used were replaced by the pure colors of the spectrum,
The Impressionists made light the dominant principle of their art; they exalted it and
made it vibrate, simultaneously abandoning contour, modeling, chiaroscuro, and
overprecise detailing. The over-all composition retained the vigor of a sketch and
created an incomplete, schematic impression that shocked their contemporaries.
The art critic Armand Silvestre made a fine distinction between the three
landscapists: "Monet, the most skillful and the most daring; Sisley, the most
harmonious and the most timid; Pissarro, the most true and the most naive."
In the first place: the principles of truth to nature and freedom of technique.
At the time of Manet's death in 1883, a new generation of artists (Georges Seurat,
Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de ToulouseLautrec) had matured. These
new painters were influenced by Impressionism but reacted against it; their
appearance coincided with the complete breakup of the initial group.
The Impressionists were not a Set group of artists with a rigid program or a
master-pupil relationship; they experienced a privileged correspondence of tastes, a
living experience, and a moment of brotherhood that was shared by young artists
who were indifferent to ideas.