A modern art movement which started in France in the 1860s - though the genre was anticipated in Ming China by the landscapist Shen Zhou (14271509). The name, coined by a hostile critic, was taken from Claude Monet's picture, Impression: sunrise (1872). The Impressionists, who included Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir, rejected the dark tones of 19th-c studio painting, set up their easels out-of-doors, and tried to capture the brilliant effects of sunlight on water, trees and fields, and pretty girls. Impressionist pictures are typically bright and cheerful, avoiding the sort of social realism favoured earlier by Gustave Courbet (181977), and others, and have been enormously popular with art-lovers and collectors.
For people who imitate famous figures, see Impressionist (entertainment).Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists who began publicly exhibiting their art in the 1860s.
Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, light colors, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, and unusual visual angles.
The influence of the Impressionists is thought to have spread beyond the art world, leading to Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
Impressionism also describes art done in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.
Overview
Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the picture-making rules of academic painting. They began by giving colors, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugene Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the world. Previously, not only still lifes and portraits but also landscapes had been painted indoors, but the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. For example, instead of physically mixing yellow and blue paint, they placed unmixed yellow paint on the canvas next to unmixed blue paint, thus mixing the colors through our perception of them: creating the "impression" of green. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details.
Although the rise of Impressionism in France happened at a time when a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, were also exploring plein-air painting, the Impressionists developed new techniques that were specific to the movement.
The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not meet with approval of the artistic establishment. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, including Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.
Beginnings
In an atmosphere of change as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war, the Académie des beaux-arts dominated the French art scene in the middle of the 19th century. The Académie was the upholder of traditional standards for French painting, both in content and style.
The Académie held an annual art show, the Salon de Paris, and artists whose work displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige.
The young artists painted in a lighter and brighter style than most of the generation before them, extending further the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school. They were more interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating scenes from history. A core group of young realists, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille, who had studied under Charles Gleyre, became friends and often painted together.
In 1863, the jury rejected The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) by Édouard Manet primarily because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men on a picnic. The jury's sharply worded rejection of Manet's painting, as well as the unusually large number of rejected works that year, set off a firestorm among French artists.
After seeing the rejected works in 1863, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was organized.
Artists' petitions requesting a new Salon des Refusés in 1867, and again in 1872, were denied. They invited a number of other progressive artists to exhibit with them, including the slightly older Eugène Boudin, whose example had first convinced Monet to take up plein air painting years before.
The critical response was mixed, with Monet and especially Cézanne bearing the harshest attacks. Derisively titling his article The Exhibition of the Impressionists, Leroy declared that Monet's painting was at most a sketch and could hardly be termed a finished work.
He wrote, in the form of a dialog between viewers,
The term "Impressionists" quickly gained favor with the public. Degas rejected much of this, as he believed in the primacy of drawing over color and belittled the practice of painting outdoors.
Among the artists of the core group (minus Bazille, who had died in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870), defections occurred as Cézanne, followed later by Renoir, Sisley and Monet, abstained from the group exhibitions in order to submit their works to the Salon.
The individual artists saw few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance. By this time the methods of Impressionist painting, in a diluted form, had become commonplace in Salon art.
Impressionist techniques
Short, thick strokes of paint are used to quickly capture the essence of the subject rather than its details. In pure Impressionism the use of black paint is avoided. Wet paint is placed into wet paint without waiting for successive applications to dry, producing softer edges and intermingling of color. Impressionist paintings do not exploit the transparency of thin paint films (glazes) which earlier artists built up carefully to produce effects. The surface of an Impressionist painting is typically opaque. In paintings made en plein air (outdoors), shadows are boldly painted with the blue of the sky as it is reflected onto surfaces, giving a sense of freshness and openness that was not captured in painting previously. (Blue shadows on snow inspired the technique.)Painters throughout history had occasionally used these methods, but Impressionists were the first to use all of them together and with such boldness. French painters who prepared the way for Impressionism include the Romantic colorist Eugène Delacroix, the leader of the realists Gustave Courbet, and painters of the Barbizon school such as Theodore Rousseau. The Impressionists learned much from the work of Camille Corot and Eugène Boudin, who painted from nature in a style that was close to Impressionism, and who befriended and advised the younger artists.
Impressionists took advantage of the mid-century introduction of premixed paints in tubes (resembling modern toothpaste tubes) which allowed artists to work more spontaneously both outdoors and indoors. Previously, each painter made his or her own paints by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil.
Content and composition
Before the Impressionists other painters, notably such 17th century Dutch painters as Jan Steen, had focused on common subjects, but their approach to composition was traditional. The Impressionists relaxed the boundary between subject and background so that the effect of an Impressionist painting often resembles a snapshot, a part of a larger reality captured as if by chance.
Another major influence was Japanese art prints (Japonism), which had originally come into the country as wrapping paper for imported goods.
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism developed from Impressionism. Camille Pissarro briefly painted in a pointillist manner, and even Monet abandoned strict plein air painting. Although these cases illustrate the difficulty of assigning labels, the work of the original Impressionist painters can by definition be categorized as Impressionism.
Painters known as Impressionists
The central figures in the development of Impressionism in France, listed alphabetically, were:
Frédéric Bazille Gustave Caillebotte (who, younger than the others, joined forces with them in the mid 1870s) Mary Cassatt (American-born, she lived in Paris and participated in four Impressionist exhibitions) Paul Cézanne (though he later broke away from the Impressionists) Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term "Impressionist" but is considered one due to his loyalty to the group) Armand Guillaumin Édouard Manet (who did not regard himself as an Impressionist, but is generally considered one) Claude Monet (the most prolific of the Impressionists and the one who most clearly embodies their aesthetic) Berthe Morisot Camille Pissarro Pierre-Auguste Renoir Alfred SisleyAmong the close associates of the Impressionists were several painters who adopted their methods to some degree. These include Giuseppe De Nittis, an Italian artist living in Paris who participated in the first Impressionist exhibit at Degas' invitation, although the other Impressionists disparaged his work.
By the early 1880s, Impressionist methods were affecting, at least superficially, the art of the Salon. Fashionable painters such as Jean Beraud and Henri Gervex found critical and financial success by brightening their palettes while retaining the smooth finish expected of Salon art.
As the influence of Impressionism spread beyond France, artists too numerous to list became identified as practitioners of the new style. Alden Weir Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and Max Slevogt in Germany Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov in Russia Francisco Oller y Cestero, a native of Puerto Rico who was a friend of Pissarro and Cézanne Laura Muntz Lyall, a Canadian artist Władysław Podkowiński, a Polish Impressionist and symbolist Nazmi Ziya Güran, who brought Impressionism to Turkey
Other visual artists known as Impressionists
The sculptor Auguste Rodin is sometimes called an Impressionist for the way he used roughly modeled surfaces to suggest transient light effects.
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