The Impressionists

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"The Impressionists were subjective painters, who looked at nature in their own individual ways. The results were, hardly surprisingly, very different, when we consider the divergent styles of say Monet, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Seurat. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Impressionism was to capture the effect of real sunlight on canvas. It is possibly this that made their pictures the most popular, and the most expensive, of the 20th century."

Impressionism began in the late 1800s in France. It is characterised by depicting objects and scenery naturally, making detail of their light and colour. Impressionists made their paintings look like a first impression (this was first noted in a painting by Claude Monet, titled Impression: Sunrise), and were critized for it. Their works were said to appear incomplete. Each of these artists opposed the traditional, dry style of painting. Although some people appreciated the new paintings, many did not. The critics and the public agreed the Impressionists couldn't draw and their colours were considered vulgar. Their compositions were strange. Their short, slapdash brushstrokes made their paintings practically illegible. That made viewers wondered why they didn't considered finishing their artwork.

Impressionism broke every rule of the French Academy of Fine Arts, the conservative school that had dominated art training and taste since 1648. Impressionist scenes of modern urban and country life were a far cry from the Academic efforts to teach moral lessons through historic, mythological, and Biblical themes. This tradition featured idealised images. Symmetrical compositions, hard outlines, and meticulously smooth paint surfaces intending to hide all traces of the artist's brushwork characterised academic paintings.

Works of the Impressionists submitted to the Academy were rejected. The art works of the Impressionists were considered to be shocking, unfinished and insulting. The Impressionists were frustrated. To them, traditional painting seemed outdated and irrelevant. Disappointed by the lack of encouragement from the Academy, they decided to proceed on their own. In 1874, the impressionist got together and mounted their own exhibition. Claude Monet, Pierre-Aguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley were all part of this group. The exhibit itself was not a success but it was the first independent group show of the Impressionist art.

The Impressionists, or "Independents," as they preferred to be called, brought together a wide variety of these influences, beliefs, and styles when they first exhibited and met in Paris cafés to discuss art. Their rejection of the Academy and the Academy's rejection of them, united the group.

The sturdiest thread linking the Impressionists was an interest in the world around them. For subject matter, they looked to contemporary people at work and play. Inventions such as the steam engine, power loom, streetlights, camera, ready-made fashions, cast iron, and steel had changed the lives of ordinary people. Underlying the Industrial Revolution was a belief that technological progress was key to all human progress. In this climate of discovery, people felt they could do anything.

The Industrial Revolution brought economic prosperity to France. Cafés, restaurants, and theatres lured the bourgeoisie, the powerful new merchant class who had made their homes in and around Paris.

Most Impressionists were born in the bourgeoisie class, and this was the world they painted. Degas prowled behind the scenes of the opera and ballet for his subjects. Monet immortalised Paris railroad stations. Nearly all the Impressionist artists painted people hurrying through busy streets and enjoying their leisure time on the boulevard, at the racetrack, in café-concerts, shops, restaurants, and parks.

However, it was not just city bustle that intrigued the Impressionists. Country themes appealed to them, too. Railroads gave people a new mobility. They could hop on a train and be in the countryside in an hour. Commuters escaped the crowded city to the suburbs that sprouted around Paris. The rivers, parks, and gardens provided recreation for weekend picnickers, swimmers, and boat parties, which the Impressionists recorded.

Painting the sidewalk café, the racetrack, or the boating party attracted the Impressionists to work outdoors, or en plein air. Most Impressionists worked directly and spontaneously from nature. The Impressionists preferred to record what they saw rather than idealise a subject. The Impressionists thought that painting their experiences was more truthful, and thus more ethical, than copying the art of the past.

Impressionist landscapes often contained people, or showed the effects of man's presence - on a bridge or path, for example. The Impressionists wanted to catch people in candid rather than staged or posed moments. It is as if the artist and we, the viewers, are watching a private, contemplative moment. We see men, women, and children floating in a rowboat, strolling under the trees, or just watching the river flow.

Impressionists often depicted people mid-task. Degas caught opera audience members watching each other instead of the stage and ballet dancers stretching or adjusting their costumes before a performance. Renoir's guitar player strums her instrument by herself. Pissarro's Parisian pedestrians hurriedly cross the city streets.

A wish to capture nature's fleeting moment led many Impressionists to paint the same scene at different times and in different weather. They had to work fast to capture the moment, or to finish an outdoor painting before the light changed. Artists had often made quick sketches in pencil or diluted oil paint on location, but now the sketch became the finished work. Impressionist painters adopted a distinctive style of rapid, broken brushstrokes: lines for people on a busy street, or specks to re-create flowers in a meadow.

These artists often applied paint so thickly that it created a rough texture on the canvas. Impressionists mixed colours right on the canvas or stroked on the hues next to each other and let the viewer's eye do the blending. This process was called optical colour mixing. Not only did this sketchy technique suggest motion, but it also captured the shimmering effects of light that engaged these artists. The rough, brilliant paintings of Impressionism were a drastic departure from the slick, highly finished canvases of Academic painters. Although the Impressionists wanted their work to look almost accidental, it's no surprise that early critics called it "lazy" and unfinished.

In its use of colour, Impressionism dramatically broke away from tradition. Advances in the fields of optics and colour theory fascinated these painters. Working outdoors, Impressionists rendered the play of sunlight and the hues of nature with a palette of bolder, lighter colours than classical studio painters used. Unlike Academy painters, who covered their canvases with a dark under painting, Impressionists worked on unprimed white canvas or a pale gray or cream background for a lighter, brighter effect.

Advances in the colour theory were leading the Impressionists to experiment with pigments. Science had shown that the colour white is composing of primary colours. This inspired the artists to mix primary pigments directly on their canvases in the order to achieve additive colour effects. Using a palette of eight to ten colours they were able to achieve many variable and subtle effects. Also the Impressionists use complementary colours to give their paintings a vibrancy that seemed to make the object come alive in the eye. "I want my red to sound like a bell!" Renoir said. "If I don't manage it at first, I put in more red, and also other colours, until I've got it."

New technology in art materials made a wider range of colour pigments available. In the past, artists had to grind and mix their own pigments with oil. Now, colour merchants sold ready-to-use paints and other materials from storefront establishments. Tubes preserved the pigment longer, allowing artists to take extended painting trips outdoors.

Perhaps no invention of the Industrial Revolution influenced Impressionism more than the camera. Black and white photography not only recorded the scene for later study, it arrested the very real-life moments that Impressionists pursued. Most of the Impressionists had cameras; in fact, Monet had four and Degas experimented with one of the early Kodak portable models. Their art took on the odd, unexpected, and asymmetrical compositions sometimes caught by the camera.

Rejecting the centred figural groups of traditional art, Impressionists thought nothing of cutting off a figure at the painting's edge, or pushing the action into corners and leaving the centre of the composition empty. Degas called photography "an image of magical instantaneity," and was particularly adept at the off-centre composition. He was also intrigued by the newly invented motion picture machine, which took multiple photographs of moving animals at high shutter speeds. He used the machine to study movement and gesture. Impressionists eagerly studied panoramic landscape photography and adopted its flattened perspective. Monet noticed that slow shutter speeds blurred moving figures, and he began to smudge his painted figures similarly.

Innovations of the Industrial Revolution found their way into the studio and into the very materials and approaches the Impressionists used. The Impressionists actively experimented with these advances and incorporated them into their art.

Another visual influence on Impressionism was the phenomenon called Japonisme. The opening of Japan to Western trade and diplomacy in 1854 led to a rage in France for all things Japanese. Japanese artifacts found an eager market in the growing middle class in Paris. In 1862, a Far Eastern curio shop called Le Porte Chinoise opened near the Louvre Museum. The shop sold fans, kimonos, lacquered boxes, hanging scrolls, ceramics, bronze statuary and other items the Impressionists used as props in their paintings. In particular, Impressionists admired Japanese wood-block prints and applied that art form's flat, decorative shapes, bright colours, and asymmetrical compositions to their own work.

The elegant Japanese prints (known as ukiyo-e, or "images of the floating world" of geishas and other popular entertainment) also inspired a new interest in printmaking. In addition to wood-block prints, Impressionists created lithographs (prints made from oil-based ink designs on wet stone) and etchings (prints from designs etched into metal plates with acid). These methods allowed Degas, Monet, Cassatt, and other artists to make multiple copies of their work and thus reach a larger audience.

In the early years of Impressionism, artists struggled to find markets for their work, and many lived hand-to-mouth. Impressionism changed when artists quarrelled with one another, withdrew from exhibitions, or, like Monet and Renoir, reverted to a more Academic style they hoped would lure buyers. Cézanne also turned away from Impressionism, disappointed that he hadn't been able "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums."

However, one visionary Paris art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, recognised the greatness of Impressionism as early as 1870. "A true picture dealer should also be an enlightened patron; he should, if necessary, sacrifice his immediate interest to his artistic convictions," Durand-Ruel wrote. He regularly bought, sold, and promoted Impressionist paintings during the early years. Finally, in the 1880s and ‘90s, the world the Impressionists painted began to embrace them. American collectors were largely responsible for this reversal of fortune, buying enough paintings to keep several artists at work. The Musée de Luxembourg in Paris mounted the first museum exhibition of Impressionist art in 1897, and an exhibition at the 1900 World Exposition sealed the artists' reputations.

What caused the public's change of heart? "Ironically," writes art historian Ann Dumas, "the Impressionists" former status as renegades enhanced their appeal to the connoisseurship and speculative skills of the bourgeois collector...(it was) a new art for a new class that wanted images of the world they inhabited."

Perhaps more crucial to its present-day popularity is the broadly appealing colour, spontaneity, and freshness of Impressionist art. Before the first exhibition in 1874, the art critic Armand Silvestre observed of these paintings, "A blond light pervades them, and everything is gaiety, clarity, spring festivals, golden evenings or apple trees in blossom. They are windows opening on the joyous countryside, on rivers full of pleasure boats stretching into the distance, on a sky which shines with light mists, on the outdoor life, panoramic and charming."

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