Impressionism – characteristics and the key painters

Impressionism is an art movement that arose in France in the 1860s and 1870s. The painters wanted to capture the shifting light and colour of a single moment, often outdoors, with quick, visible brushstrokes. The name comes from Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise.

Facts

How Impressionism got its name

In Paris the official Salon decided who could exhibit and sell. A group of young painters who were rejected time and again decided to organise their own exhibition, and in April 1874 it opened in the photographer Nadar's former studio on the boulevard des Capucines.

One of the paintings was Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a harbour scene from Le Havre painted with a few strokes. The critic Louis Leroy made fun of the title and called his review “Exhibition of the Impressionists”. The jibe became the group's name. Until 1886 they held eight joint exhibitions.

How the Impressionists painted

The Impressionists often painted en plein air, outdoors, and worked quickly to catch the light before it changed. Paint in tubes, which became common in the middle of the 19th century, made it possible to take the palette outside. They often set pure colours side by side instead of mixing them on the palette, and made shadows blue or violet instead of brown.

Monet painted the same motif in different light, such as the Saint-Lazare railway station and later haystacks and Rouen Cathedral. The brushstrokes are clearly visible, outlines dissolve and the surface looks almost unfinished. That was exactly what provoked the public, who were used to the smoothly polished painting of the Salon.

The painters and their subjects

The Impressionists painted modern life: boulevards, cafés, railways, theatres and Sunday outings along the Seine. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted dances and parties in sunlight, Camille Pissarro countryside and city views, and he was the only one to take part in all eight exhibitions. Alfred Sisley devoted himself almost entirely to landscape.

Edgar Degas preferred to call himself a realist and painted indoors, often ballet dancers as in The Dance Class. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt depicted the lives of women and children, as in Morisot's The Cradle. Édouard Manet was a model for the group but never exhibited with them.

Japan and photography

Two new visual worlds influenced the Impressionists. After Japan opened to trade in the 1850s, Japanese colour woodcuts reached Paris, and the painters learnt from their flat areas of colour, high horizons and boldly cropped motifs. Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa is the best-known example. The enthusiasm for Japanese art was called Japonisme.

Photography taught them that a picture can cut off a figure in mid-movement and that the moment itself can be a subject. Degas cropped his dancers and café scenes as though the picture were a passing glimpse. At the same time photography made it less important for painters to reproduce reality exactly, which gave them the freedom to paint light and impressions instead.

Impressionism in the Nordic countries

Many Scandinavian artists studied in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s and brought the bright open-air painting home. Anders Zorn captured light on water and skin with quick strokes, as in Midsummer Dance, and Georg Pauli painted Breakfast Time in full daylight.

Impressionism opened the way to modern painting. Already in the 1880s painters such as Cézanne, Seurat and van Gogh began to move further, towards what is called Post-Impressionism. Read more about the period on the page on Impressionism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which painting gave Impressionism its name?