A Guide to Impressionism

The accepted style of painting often featured:

• Great historical subjects or mythological scenes that were meant to be morally uplifting;
• An emphasis on line, filled in with color;
• Smooth, almost invisible brushstrokes;
• Paintings primarily done in the artist’s studio

Impressionist style of painting often featured:

• Ordinary subjects from everyday life;
• An emphasis on color, lines, “dissolved”;
• Highly visible brushstrokes referred to as “painterly”;
• Paintings completed outdoors or en plein air.

The majority of artists continued to struggle for acceptance into the Salon in the years following the famous 1863 Salon des Refusés—the Impressionists among them. But while they wanted the recognition and financial stability the Salon’s approval could offer, they also wanted to pursue new ways of painting. As a result, their works were often returned, stamped with the infamous red R.

In 1874, determined to make the public aware of their art, the Impressionists organized their own exhibition separate from the Salon. A year earlier, the group took the unprecedented step of forming a private, independent association of artists called Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. (Anonymous society of artists, painters, sculptors, and printmakers). The decision to hold an exhibition that was essentially a capitalistic enterprise was a bold one in many ways. Unlike the multitude of artists who exhibited at the Salon, only thirty artists participated in this exhibit, and each could display several works as opposed to the limit of two imposed by the Salon. The works were exhibited in a casual, intimate manner; some were displayed on easels, almost as if the viewers were visiting an artist’s studio. Held in the large, modern, glass-fronted studio of the great French photographer Félix Nadar, the exhibition opened two weeks earlier than the Salon, a tactic chosen to garner advance publicity and negate any notions that the exhibition consisted of rejected works. The strategy worked; the exhibit attracted a great deal of media attention. In fact, it was a journalist, mocking Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise, who gave the group the name that would later become synonymous with beauty: Impressionism.

In Open Air

Advances in transportation made tourism ever easier for the French middle and upper classes. Holidays by the sea were all the rage, and visitors flocked to scenic ports along the coast of the English Channel (referred to as La Manche in France) to take advantage of the healthful sea breezes. They enjoyed the opportunity to see and be seen, as evidenced by the stylish clothing of the vacationers in this painting by Eugène Boudin.

Like artists today, 19^th-century painters worked hard to make a living from their art. Boudin’s pictures of fashionable figures on the beach were very popular, no doubt reminding those who bought them of their own seaside excursions. But Boudin’s upbringing and childhood—his father was a seaman and the artist himself spent time as a cabin boy—sometimes made him feel “ashamed at painting the idle rich.”

The subjects that truly captured Boudin’s heart were the ever-changing play of light and clouds billowing across the sky. To capture these fleeting effects, he painted directly from nature using short, rapid brushstrokes to sketch the scene.

Boudin influenced the new generation of artists coming along, especially the young Claude Monet. In fact, Boudin exhibited along with the Impressionists in their groundbreaking exhibition of 1874. Boudin’s unofficial student, Claude Monet, became the driving force in the new style of art. Following Boudin’s example, the passionate young artist began his lifelong love of painting outdoors. Monet later said, “Boudin, with untiring kindness, undertook my education. My eyes were finally opened and I really understood nature; I learned at the same time to love it.”

Like Boudin, Monet used short, quick brushstrokes to convey the rich details in this painting. Although titled Camille at the Window, the work is more than a portrait of the artist’s wife: she becomes, almost, one the flowers he has vigorously depicted.

Over the next ten years, Monet continued to explore the effects of light on his outdoor subjects. He also began to push the boundaries of what was acceptable treatment of color in his paintings. By the time he completed Field of Poppies, Giverny, the features that would become trademarks of the Impressionist style were in place: bright, contrasting colors; distinctive brushwork; and subjects from daily life painted outdoors.

The son of a tailor and a dressmaker, Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent his teenage years decorating ceramics in a porcelain factory. By 1860, however, he began attending painting classes at the private studio of the Swiss artist Charles Gleyre. Here Renoir became friends with Claude Monet, and soon the two artists were journeying to the countryside to paint directly from nature.

From a technical point of view, both Renoir and Monet painted in the Impressionist style: both used fresh, bright colors applied in short, rapid brushstrokes, and both showed scenes from daily life. But compare Renoir’s Pensive with Monet’s Camille at the Window (both painted at 1870s). How are they different? Renoir’s brushstrokes appear more delicate, almost feathery. More than any painter in the Impressionist group, Renoir focused on people, especially women and children, in quiet, gentle scenes.

Capturing Movement

Unlike his fellow Impressionists, Edgar Degas preferred to work in his studio rather than outdoors. While Monet and Renoir painted directly on their canvases, Degas more often prepared detailed drawings before he put a brush to his paintings. “No art,” he declared,” is less spontaneous than mine.” But in his choice of modern-day subjects, this serious young artist allied himself with the Impressionist group, joining in almost all of their exhibitions. He was also the most influenced by photography, especially Eadweard Muybridge’s revolutionary work showing the horse in motion that was published in Paris in 1874.

Degas’s At the Races: Before the Start freezes the restless activity of sleek thoroughbreds and their jockeys as they prepare to approach the post. The eye follows the line of horses across the canvas, from the cropped figure on the right to those that ride off into the distance. The colorful silks sparkle in the sunlight against the lush fields of green and gold.

Berthe Morisot was the first woman in the history of French art to be fully accepted as a peer by a group of male artists. A radical idea in itself, Morisot’s inclusion reinforced Impressionism as a art movement for modern life. As a well-bred young woman from a successful bourgeois family, it would not have been unusual for her to pursue painting as a hobby. She studied under Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and other instructors, but her art took a decidedly serious turn under the influence of her friend Édouard Manet. At the time it was very difficult for women of her rank to pursue careers other than marriage and motherhood, but Moristot managed to accomplish all three. She married Manet’s brother, had a child, and exhibited in all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions.

Morisot specialized in depicting modern life as lived by women like her. Her subjects tend to be members of her family or close friends, not unusual since young women, even married women, were limited in their excursions to public places and were always chaperoned.

The woman in this painting has just stepped outside to water a plant in a jardinière. She lifts the hem of her white house gown to keep it clean. The loose brushwork is characteristic of Morisot’s desire to capture the subject with as few strokes as possible. While some critics objected to this economy of brushwork, others praised her spontaneity and delicate sense of color—once compared to crushed jewels and flower petals.

The Impressionists painters, though united in many aspects, maintained their individuality as artists throughout their careers. Their influence guided a generation of painters who followed the paths established by the Impressionists and then forged new direction of their own. For example, beneath the painterly surface of Paul Cézanne’s 1877 portrait of Victor Chocquet, there is an underlying structure based on geometric shapes that would later revolutionize how artists understood and portrayed the world. Vincent van Gogh’s energetic, expressive brushwork in Wheat Field behind St. Paul’s Hospital, Saint Rémy, reflects an Impressionist heritage but speaks more to an inner reality of mind and spirit than an outward representation of the land.

The Impressionists’ revolutionary way of looking at, depicting, and understanding the world forever changed the course of art, opening doors to ever-diverse means of artistic expressions in response to an ever-changing modern society.