I.

Introduction

Impressionism, 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.