Impressionism




The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient 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 independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet,whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.
The word ``impressionniste'' was printed for the first time in the Charivari on the 25 April 1874 by Louis Leroy, after Claude Monet's landscape entitled Impressions: soleil levant [Impressions]. This word was used to call Exposition des Impressionnistes an exhibit hold in the salons of the photographer Nadar and organized by the ``Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs'' [``Anonymous society of painters, sculptors and engravers''], composed of Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Guillaumin and Berthe Morisot.

The Founders

The founders of this society were animated by the will to break with the official art. The official theory that the color should be dropped pure on the canvas instead of getting mixed on the palette will only be respected by a few of them and only for a couple of years. In fact, the Impressionism is a lot more a state of the mind than a technique; thus artists other than painters have also been qualified of impressionists. Many of these painters ignore the law of simultaneous contrast as established by Chevreul in 1823. The expressions ``independants'' or ``open air painters'' may be more appropriate than ``impressionists'' to qualify those artists continuing a tradition inherited from Eugène Delacroix, who thought that the drawing and colors were a whole, and English landscape painters, Constable Bonington and especially William Turner, whose first law was the observation of nature, as for landscape painters working in Barbizon and in the Fontainebleau forest.

Eugène Boudin, Stanislas Lépine and the Dutch Jongkind, were among the forerunners of the movement. In 1858, Eugène Boudin met in Honfleur Claude Monet, aged about 15 years. He brought him to the seashore, gave him colors and learned him how to observe the changing lights on the Seine estuary. In those years, Boudin is still the minor painter of the Pardon de Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, but is on the process of getting installed on the Normandy coast to paint the beaches of Trouville and Le Havre. On the Côte de Grâce, in the Saint-Siméon farm, he attracts many painters including Courbet, Bazille, Monet, Sisley. The last three will meet in Paris in the free Gleyre studio, and in 1863 they will discover a porcelain painter, Auguste Renoir.

At the same time, other artists wanted to bypass the limitations attached to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and were working quai des Orfèvres in the Swiss Academy; the eldest, from the Danish West Indies, was Camille Pissarro; the other two were Paul Cézanne and Armand Guillaumin.

Le ``Salon des Refusés''

These people were highly impressed by the works of Edouard Manet, and became outraged when they learned that he was refused for the 1863 Salon. The indignation was so high among the artistic population that Napoleon III allowed the opening of a ``Salon des Refusés'', where Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, Cals, Chintreuil, Fantin-Latour, etc. showed their works. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe provoked a great enthusiasm among the young painters, who saw represented in Manet's painting many of their concerns. They started meeting around him in the café Guerbois, 9, avenue de Clichy, and thus creating l'école des Batignolles.



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