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Art Through Time · 1867 to 1910

Impressionism

Impressionism was the movement of painters in Paris who, from the late 1860s, painted outdoors and quickly to catch the changing light of a single moment. They first showed together in 1874, and a critic named them after Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise.

Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt worked in loose, visible brushstrokes and bright color, and they painted modern life: boating parties, cafés, railway stations and the new boulevards of Paris.

When
1867 to 1910
Began
The 1860s; first group exhibition, Paris 1874
Grew out of
Barbizon School, Realism, Japonisme

When was Impressionism?

As a movement, Impressionism runs from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s. The group held eight exhibitions in Paris. The first opened in April 1874 in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, on the Boulevard des Capucines; the last was in 1886.

By then the group was splitting. Georges Seurat showed A Sunday on La Grande Jatte at that last exhibition, and the painters who came after are now called the Post-Impressionists. As a way of painting, Impressionism lasted much longer: Monet painted his water lilies at Giverny until his death in 1926, and painters from the United States to Denmark made their own versions into the 1910s.

How to recognize Impressionism

  • Visible brushstrokes. Short dabs and commas of paint, left unblended, so the surface stays alive.
  • Light as the subject. The same motif painted again at another hour or season, as in Monet's series of stacks of wheat, 1890 to 1891.
  • Color in the shadows. Blues and violets where earlier painters used brown and black.
  • Painted outdoors. Working en plein air, made easier by paint sold in tin tubes, an invention of the 1840s.
  • Modern life. Parisians at leisure, as in Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, and the city itself, as in Gustave Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day.
  • Cropped, off-center views, learned in part from photography and from Japanese prints.

Why Impressionism shocked Paris

The French art world ran through the Salon, the official exhibition, whose juries rewarded smooth, finished pictures of history and myth. The Impressionists' sketch-like canvases were turned away again and again, so in 1874 they organized a show of their own.

The critic Louis Leroy mocked it in the satirical paper Le Charivari, under the title "The Exhibition of the Impressionists", taking the word from Monet's harbor at Le Havre at dawn. The painters kept the name. Within twelve years the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel was showing their work in New York, and American collectors became some of their first great buyers.

Famous Impressionist paintings

What came after Impressionism?

Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Seurat kept its bright color and turned it to structure, feeling and symbol: Post-Impressionism. In the United States, American Impressionism carried the style from Giverny to the coast of Connecticut.

Inside Impressionism

Impressionism painters

More Impressionism paintings

See Impressionism on the timelineEvery art movement in order