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Impressionism was a crucial artistic movement, originally in painting and later on in music, that developed mainly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a particular types of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most obvious characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively depict visual real images in terms of moving effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together andindependently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also worked in an Impressionist style for a period in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s influenced Monet and others of the group, himself took up the Impressionist approach about 1873.

These artists had become bored earlier in their careers with academic teaching’s emphasis on depicting an historical or mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones. They also rejected the established imaginative or idealising treatments of academic painting. By the late 1860s, Manet’s art reflected a new aesthetic—which became a guiding style in Impressionist work—in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was ignored and attention was moved to the artist’s use of colours, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. In Manet’s work the subject became the vehicle for the artful composition of sections of flat colour, and perspectival depth was reduced so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns and relationships of the painting rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the revolutionary painters Eugene Boudin and J.R. Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by means of highly coloured and texturally varied modes of paint application. The Impressionists also adopted Boudin’s practice of working entirely outside while looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing up their painting from sketches in the studio, as was the usual practice.

In the late 1860s Monet, Pisarro, Renoir, and their colleagues began painting landscapes and river scenes in which they attempted to realistically paint the colours and forms of objects as they appeared in natural light at the given time. These artists stopped using the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns and grays and rather painted using a lighter, sunnier, more airy key. They started by copying the play of light upon water and the reflected colours of ripples, attempting to copy the innumerable and motion effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they saw. In their efforts to reproduce initial visible impressions as registered on the retina, they abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complementary colours instead. More importantly, they learned to paint objects out of discreet flecks and dabs of pure harmonising or contrasting colour, thereby evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of shade produced by sunlight and its reflections. Forms in the paintings lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized, shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. And finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned favouring a realistically casual and less contrived positioning of objects within the picture. The Impressionists extended their newfound techniques to depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and interesting buildings such as railroad stations.

In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official Salon of the French Academy, which had consistently rejected most of their works. Monet’s painting “Impression: Sunrise” (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris) earned them the initially derisive name “Impressionists” from the journalist Louis Leroy writing of them in the satirical magazine Le Charivari in 1874. The artists themselves soon adopted the name because it was a perfect description of their intention to accurately paint visual “impressions.” They held 7 following exhibitions, the last in 1886. During that time they continued to develop their own personal and individual styles. All, however, affirmed in their work the principles of freedom of technique, a personal rather than a conventional approach to subject matter, and the realistic reproduction of nature.

By the mid-1880s the Impressionist collaboration had begun to disperse as each painter increasingly pursued his own aesthetic interests and principles. In a short time, however, it had accomplished a revolution in the study of art, providing a technical starting point for the post-impressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Georges Seurat and clearing subsequent Western painting from traditional techniques and approaches to subject matter.

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