Impressionism (art)

I

Introduction

Impressionism (art), movement in painting that developed in late 19th-century France in reaction against the formalism and sentimentality that characterized the academic art of that time. The Impressionist movement is often considered to mark the beginning of the modern period in art. By extension, the term also came to be applied to a certain style of music of the early 20th century. See Impressionism (music).

Impressionism in painting arose out of dissatisfaction with the classical and sentimental subjects and dry, precise techniques of paintings that were approved by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and created in studio settings. The Académie traditionally set the standards of French art and sponsored the official Paris Salon exhibitions, which reflected and popularized them. Rejecting these standards, the Impressionists preferred to paint outdoors, choosing landscapes and street scenes, as well as figures from everyday life. Their primary object was to achieve a spontaneous, undetailed rendering of the world through careful representation of the effect of natural light on objects. The foremost Impressionists included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.

The Impressionists were concerned with the depiction of reality not through the exact rendering of form but through capturing the effects of light; they believed that light tends to diffuse the outlines of form and to reflect in shadows the colours of surrounding objects. In academic painting, form was defined and shape modelled by graduated tones; shadows were indicated with black and brown. The Impressionists, by contrast, eliminated minor details and suggested rather than defined form. They preferred the primary colours—red, yellow, and blue—and complementary colours—green, purple, and orange. They achieved effects of naturalness and immediacy by placing short brushstrokes of these colours side by side, juxtaposing primary colours so that they would appear to blend when viewed from a distance. Juxtaposing a primary colour (such as red) with its complementary colour (green) brought out the vivid quality of each. Thus the Impressionists achieved greater brilliance and luminosity in their paintings than that ordinarily produced by blending pigments before applying them to the canvas.

II

History

Although the particular characteristics of French Impressionism were innovative in 19th-century painting, the attempt to depict the effects of natural light was not new. In the 17th century, Jan Vermeer had used a sharp contrast of light and shadow to bathe his canvases in natural light. Diego Velázquez in the 18th century and Francisco de Goya in the early 19th century conveyed the impression of natural light by eliminating minor shadows and representing areas of light rather than details of form. Their brushwork is similar to that of the French Impressionists.

The direct precursors of Impressionism were the English landscape painters John Constable and J. M. W. Turner. When Monet and Pissarro first saw their work, in 1871, they were particularly impressed by Turner's rendering of atmosphere and his representation of the diffusing effects of light on solid objects. The Barbizon School of painting was also a precursor of the Impressionist movement in France. Thirty years before the first Impressionist exhibition, Camille Corot, an occasional member of the Barbizon School who is sometimes called the “father of Impressionism”, interpreted the fleeting aspects of changing light in a series of subjects painted during different hours of the day. Eugène Louis Boudin, Monet's first teacher, a pre-Impressionist painter of seascapes swiftly executed at their actual locales, taught his successors to convey a feeling of spontaneity. Gustave Courbet encouraged the Impressionists to seek inspiration from everyday life.

III

Leading Figures

Édouard Manet, sometimes called the first Impressionist—although he rejected that term for his own work—showed that capturing subtle effects of light can be accomplished as effectively by the juxtaposition of bright, contrasting colours as by shadings of intermediary tones. His Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863, Louvre, Paris), exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, which had been organized in opposition to the salon showing of the Académie, signalled the beginning of a new era in art. The Impressionist painters organized their first independent exhibition in 1874. The 28 exhibitors were united in their common rejection of the prevailing art styles and their admiration for the bold vignette-like paintings of Manet. The term “impressionist” was first used by the journalist Leroy in the Parisian magazine Charivari to characterize derisively a painting by Claude Monet entitled Impression, Sunrise (1873, Musée Marmottan, Paris). The term was officially adopted for the Impressionists' third exhibition in 1877. Notable French contemporaries who championed the Impressionists included such literary figures as Émile Zola and Charles Baudelaire, the painter-collector Gustave Caillebotte, and the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Long accustomed to the conventional academic style, the press and public were initially hostile to the new style. During ensuing years, however, Impressionism gradually won acceptance.

The Impressionists developed individual styles and as a group benefited from their common experiments with colour. Monet alone was doctrinaire in applying what had become Impressionist theory. He painted many series of studies—the cathedral of Rouen, haystacks, a lily pond, and poplars—each study painted at different times of the day and different seasons of the year. Pissarro used a subdued palette and concentrated equally on the effects of light and on the structure of forms. Sisley, although greatly influenced by Monet, retained his own delicacy of style. Degas, who was not an orthodox Impressionist, caught the fleeting moment, especially in ballet and horse-racing scenes. Renoir preferred to paint the female form rather than pure landscapes. Morisot's subtly painted landscapes gained strength from brushwork rather than colour.

French Impressionism was widely influential. Outside France, the most marked effects of the style were seen in the work of the American painter J. A. M. Whistler, whose so-called nocturnes (1877) portray such effects as fireworks or lights shining through mist. Other artists affected by Impressionism include the Americans Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent, the Englishman Walter Sickert, the Italian Giovanni Segantini, and the Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla.

Impressionism had far-reaching effects. Painters who began as Impressionists developed other techniques, which started new movements in art. The French painters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac painted entire canvases with small dots of colour in a scientific application of Impressionist theory known as Pointillism. The Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were greatly influenced by the Impressionists' brilliant use of colour. Cézanne's work anticipated Cubism, while that of Gauguin and van Gogh was an early stage of Expressionism.