Golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of Academic painting. This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life. The artists' loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefullyĬonstructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley's 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees. Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.Ĭlaude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or
The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be Innovative style as a revolution in painting. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably More progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon, for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selectedĪrtworks and awarded medals. Its founding members included Claude Monet,Įdgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, among others. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism. “They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: ‘Put Impression.In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. When Monet was asked to name his painting, he accidentially coined a term that would define the movement.
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Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley, all contributed work painted in a new style, focused on light, and usually painted outside, thanks to the recently invented portable paint tube. Two years later, Monet was organizing an independant exhibition of artists who were experimenting like him.
In his words, Monet painted “during dawn, day, dusk, and dark and from varying viewpoints, some from the water itself and others from a hotel room looking down over the port.” It was practice - an experiement. Monet was interested in light.Īnd so Monet threw himself into the study of reflections of light on water, with the port as his perfect subject. But in 1872, when Claude Monet was painting a hazy interpretation of the seaport in his hometown of Le Havre in France, the birth of a movement was far from his mind. Today, Impressionism is one of the most well known and beloved movements in Western Art.