Impressionism
The Impressionists broke every one of these rules. They painted outdoors (
The Salon rejected them. So in April 1874, thirty artists organised their own independent exhibition at the studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. Among the works was Monet's Impression, Sunrise — a hazy view of Le Havre harbour at dawn, painted with loose dabs of orange and blue. The critic Louis Leroy wrote a savage review titled "Exhibition of the Impressionists," using the word as a slur. The artists adopted it.
The Artists
Claude Monet (1840–1926)
The movement's driving force. Monet painted the same subjects obsessively under different conditions — haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, the Thames, and finally the water lilies at Giverny, where he spent the last forty-three years of his life creating the
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Where Monet painted light, Renoir painted joy. His great subject was human happiness — dancing couples, sunlit gardens, children, bathers. Le Moulin de la Galette (1876) captures a Montmartre dance hall dappled with filtered sunlight, and it remains one of the most purely pleasurable paintings ever made.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917)
Degas resisted the label "Impressionist" and preferred to work indoors from sketches and photographs. His subjects — ballet dancers, racehorses, laundresses, women bathing — are observed with a detached, almost voyeuristic precision. His pastels of dancers at the Paris Opéra are technically extraordinary, capturing motion through composition rather than blur.
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895)
The first woman to join the Impressionists and one of the founding members of the 1874 exhibition. Morisot's paintings of domestic life — women reading, children playing, gardens — are painted with a freedom of brushwork that matches Monet's. She was central to the movement, not peripheral, and her exclusion from traditional art histories is a distortion now being corrected.
Camille Pissarro (1830–1903)
The eldest of the group, Pissarro was the connective tissue — he exhibited in all eight Impressionist shows and mentored Cézanne, Gauguin, and the younger Neo-Impressionists. His street scenes of Paris and Rouen, painted from upper-floor windows, are studies in urban light and movement.
Post-Impressionism and Legacy
By the mid-1880s, the Impressionists had won their battle with the establishment but were fragmenting artistically. Cézanne moved toward structural geometry. Seurat pioneered Pointillism. Van Gogh (a Dutchman, but trained in Paris) pushed colour to emotional extremes. Gauguin left for Tahiti. These developments — collectively labelled Post-Impressionism — led directly to Fauvism, Cubism, and the entire trajectory of modern art.
The Impressionists' commercial triumph is total. Monet's Meules (Haystacks) sold for $110.7 million in 2019. The Musée d'Orsay, which houses the world's greatest Impressionist collection, is the third most visited museum in Paris. And Giverny — Monet's garden and studio — draws 700,000 visitors a year to a tiny Norman village that would otherwise have no international profile at all.
Where to See Impressionism in France
- Musée d'Orsay, Paris: The definitive collection — Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, all in a converted railway station
- Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris: Monet's Water Lilies in the oval rooms he designed for them
- Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris: The largest collection of Monet's work, including Impression, Sunrise
- Giverny (Normandy): Monet's house, studio, and gardens — the water lily pond and Japanese bridge are exactly as he painted them
- Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen: Works by Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro in the city that Monet painted thirty times
- Auvers-sur-Oise: Van Gogh's final home; the church, wheat fields, and Ravoux Inn where he died