c. 1860–1890

Impressionism

In the spring of 1874, a group of painters in Paris showed pictures that critics dismissed as unfinished. They wanted to paint not what we know about the world, but what the eye sees in a single instant. The mockery of their “impressions” gave its name to the first great movement of modern art.

A morning in the harbour at Le Havre

From his hotel window, Claude Monet looks out over the harbour at Le Havre. Cranes, masts and chimneys dissolve into the haze, an orange-red sun is mirrored in the water, and rowing boats glide through the blue-grey morning light in the foreground. Monet paints quickly, in thin layers; some passages are little more than a breath of colour. In 2014, the astronomer Donald Olson analysed the position of the sun, the tides and weather records, and concluded that the scene was most likely painted on 13 November 1872 at around 7:35 a.m.

When the picture was to be exhibited a year and a half later, it still had no title. “View of Le Havre” would hardly do, Monet later recalled, so he said: “Put Impression.” That offhand word became the name of an era.

Against the Salon

In nineteenth-century France, no painter could build a career without the Salon. The great Paris exhibition was marketplace, hall of fame and gatekeeper rolled into one, and a jury decided what was shown. At the top of the hierarchy of genres stood history painting: scenes from mythology, the Bible and history, composed in the studio and finished to a flawless polish. Landscapes and scenes of everyday life ranked far lower.

In 1863 the jury rejected so many works that Napoleon III ordered a separate Salon des Refusés, a “Salon of the Rejected”. There, Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe caused a scandal: a naked woman among fully dressed contemporary men, painted in stark contrasts and without any mythological pretext. Manet became a figurehead for a younger generation who met at the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles district, among them Monet, Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas and the writer Émile Zola.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 interrupted this new beginning. Bazille was killed in November 1870. Monet and Pissarro took refuge in London, where they saw the landscapes of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who would prove decisive for the group.

1874: the exhibition that started it all

On 15 April 1874, a little over two weeks before the official Salon, an exhibition by the “Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc.” opened in the former studio of the photographer Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines. Around 30 artists took part, among them Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Paul Cézanne and, as the only woman, Berthe Morisot. There was no jury and there were no medals; the participants funded the show themselves.

On 25 April, the critic Louis Leroy published a satirical piece in the paper Le Charivari in which a fictional academic painter despairs in front of the pictures. Its title: “L’Exposition des impressionnistes”. It was meant as an insult: these painters, the charge went, offered mere impressions instead of finished pictures. The group turned the jibe around and embraced the name. During the third exhibition in 1877, Renoir’s friend Georges Rivière even published a short-lived magazine called L’Impressionniste.

Financially, 1874 was a failure, and the company was dissolved before the year was out. Even so, seven more joint exhibitions followed until 1886.

Seeing as a method

The Impressionists set out to paint not what we know about an object, but what the eye actually perceives at a given moment. To do so, they developed a new way of painting:

Working outdoors: Ready-mixed paint in metal tubes, available from the 1840s, and portable easels made it possible to work directly in front of the subject, en plein air. The railway carried painters swiftly from Paris to the Seine at Argenteuil, Bougival or Louveciennes.
New pigments: Synthetic colours such as artificial ultramarine, cobalt blue and chrome yellow expanded the palette with brilliant, pure tones.
Light grounds: Instead of dark-primed canvases, they painted on white or pale grounds that glow through the paint.
The open brushstroke: Short, visible strokes sit side by side, unblended. The picture only comes together in the viewer’s eye. They often painted wet-on-wet, in a single session.
Coloured shadows: Shadows are no longer black or brown but blue, violet or green, just as they actually appear in daylight.

Important impulses came from outside painting. Photography sharpened their eye for the chance framing and the fleeting moment. Japanese woodblock prints, circulating in Paris from the 1860s, offered flat compositions and unusual viewpoints. Degas and Mary Cassatt in particular cropped figures at the edge of the picture, as if the eye had only just caught them.

Paris turns modern

At the same time, the city itself was being transformed. From 1853, the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, acting for Napoleon III, had entire districts torn down to make way for wide boulevards, parks and railway stations. The Impressionists made this new Paris their subject: in 1877 Monet painted a whole group of views inside the Gare Saint-Lazare, Gustave Caillebotte the rain-soaked streets near the Place de l’Europe, and Renoir the Sunday dances at the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre.

The group was never uniform. Degas disliked the label “Impressionist”, worked almost exclusively in the studio and was drawn to dancers, laundresses and life behind the scenes. Manet, whom many regarded as the movement’s pioneer, never exhibited with the group. Berthe Morisot and the American Mary Cassatt, who joined in 1879, painted mainly interiors, gardens and family scenes, partly because women of their class could not freely frequent many public places. In an influential 1988 essay, the art historian Griselda Pollock examined these “spaces of femininity”.

Same subject, different light

It was Monet who pursued the core idea most rigorously. In 1891 he showed a group of paintings of the same grainstacks at different times of day and year at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Poplars, the west façade of Rouen Cathedral and views of the Thames in London followed. The subject became a pretext; the real theme was changing light.

In 1893 Monet began creating a water-lily pond in his garden at Giverny, a motif that occupied him until his death in 1926. Shortly after the Armistice in November 1918, he offered the French state a series of large-scale water-lily paintings. The monumental canvases, which envelop visitors in two oval rooms, were inaugurated at the Musée de l’Orangerie in 1927, a few months after his death. With their boundless, almost objectless surfaces, they later became a touchstone for post-war abstract painting.

From ridicule to world fame

Success was a long time coming. For years Durand-Ruel bought the group’s pictures, more than once bringing himself to the brink of ruin. The breakthrough came in 1886 with a large exhibition in New York that opened up a wealthy American market. It is one reason why so many key works hang in American museums today.

How contested the new painting still was in France became clear with Gustave Caillebotte’s bequest. The wealthy painter and collector had stipulated in his will as early as 1876 that his collection of works by his friends should go to the state. After his death in 1894, and lengthy negotiations, the state accepted only about forty works. When the Caillebotte room opened at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1897, academic artists protested. Today these pictures form the core of the Musée d’Orsay’s collection.

Endings and afterlife

The eighth and final group exhibition in 1886 made the shift plain. Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Caillebotte were absent; instead, Georges Seurat showed Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte), built up from countless dots of colour and rigorously composed. With Seurat and Paul Signac, Neo-Impressionism began, replacing spontaneous perception with a systematic method informed by the colour theory of the day.

Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, by contrast, sought firmer form, greater expressiveness and symbolic colour. In 1910 the English critic Roger Fry grouped them together as “Post-Impressionists” in a London exhibition. Their ideas gave rise to Fauvism, Expressionism and Cubism.

In Germany, French painting initially met with resistance. Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Berlin Nationalgalerie from 1896, brought French Impressionists into the museum with the help of private donors, among them Manet’s In the Conservatory. This drew him into a long conflict with Kaiser Wilhelm II, and in 1909 he moved to Munich. At the same time, Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt developed a distinctly German strand of Impressionism.

Why it still matters

Impressionism produced not only new pictures but a new attitude: painting need not present a final truth; it may capture a subjective, fleeting glance. In doing so, it opened the door to modernism. That these once-ridiculed pictures now draw crowds to museums around the world is one of the great ironies of art history.