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| "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." |
Art Critic Armand Silvestre
on the work of the Impressionist painters in 1874 |
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Impressionism was a revolutionary movement in painting, centered in France, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Impressionist artists were drawn together by a desire to bring a new kind of realism to painting, an approach to both technique and subject matter that
broke dramatically with the entrenched and staid style of the French Academy. Impressionist painters shared an acute interest in representing cosmopolitan life, as well as the middle-class leisure pleasures of garden and country, through sophisticated use of scientific color theory and keen attention to the play of light.
The impressionists often worked "en plein air," or outdoors (a relatively new way of working at that time enabled by the recent availability of paint in tubes), to capture the fleeting effects of sunlight and atmosphere in quick brushstrokes of bold, unmixed color applied directly to the canvas. The Impressionists employed asymmetrical
compositions, the bold graphic organization of Japanese woodblock prints, and a photographically inspired use of framing to convey a vibrant and light-infused sense of the modern life they shared in the late 19th century.
Most well-known among the painters associated with the Impressionist style are Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919),
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), and
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) also painted in
the Impressionist style during the 1870s. Many of the Impressionists were deeply influenced by the work of Edouard Manet (1832-1883), who they thought of as the first great modern painter.
The Impressionist movement was active from the early 1870s into the '90s. Along with the artists directly associated with the Impressionist movement's exhibitions in Paris, Impressionist painting inspired the work of many contemporary painters such as
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Georges Seurat (1859-1891), and Henri
Matisse (1869-1954). Although Impressionism was not widely appreciated in its heyday, it has since become one of the most popular styles of painting and is thought of as a foundation stone of modern painting in the 20th century. |
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