The first steps toward a systematic Impressionist style were taken in France in Monet’s coast scenes from 1866 onward, notably the Terrace (1866), in which he chose a subject that allowed use of a full palette of primary colour. The decisive development took place in 1869, when Monet and Renoir painted together at the resort of La Grenouillère on the Seine River. The resulting pictures suggest that Monet contributed the pattern of separate brushstrokes, the light tonality, and the brilliance of colour; Renoir the overall iridescence, feathery lightness of touch, and delight in the recreation of ordinary people. Working at Louveciennes from 1869, Pissarro evolved the drier and more-flexible handling of crumbly paint that was also to be a common feature of Impressionist painting.

It was in the environs of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War that there developed the fully formed landscape style that remains the most popular achievement of modern painting. An exhibition held in the studio of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in 1874 included Monet’s picture Impression: Sunrise, and it was this work that, by being disparaged as mere “impressionism,” gave a name to an entire movement. The exhibition itself revealed three main trends. The Parisian circle around Monet and Renoir had developed the evanescent and sketchlike style the furthest. The vision of those working near Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers was in general more solid, being firmly rooted in country scenes. A relatively urbane, genrelike trend was detectable in Degas’s picture of Paul Valpinçon and his family at the races called Carriage at the Races (1870–73) and Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle (1873). Manet himself was absent, hoping for academic success; his Gare Saint-Lazare (1873), influenced by the Impressionist palette, was accepted at the Salon. Modeling himself on Pissarro, Cézanne sublimated the turbulent emotions of his earlier work in pictures that were studied directly and closely from nature; he followed the method for the rest of his life.

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The experiment of an independent exhibition was repeated in 1876, though with fewer participants. Monet now began to make studies of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Renoir used effects of dappled light and shadow to explore genre subjects such as Le Moulin de la galette (1876). In 1877 only 18 artists exhibited. The major painters began to go their separate ways, particularly as there were disputes about whether to continue with the independent exhibitions. Cézanne, who did not exhibit with the Impressionists again, was perhaps the first to realize that a critical stage had been reached. For the first time, a style had been based on the openly individual character of a technique rather than on the form of a particular subject or the way it was formulated. A style that admits to painting as being only a matter of paint raises in a peculiarly acute form the question of how far the qualities of art are intrinsic. Impressionism in the 1870s was inseparable from heightened visual experience of a sensuously satisfying world. But the blocklike shapes in Cézanne’s pictures, such as the portrait of his patron Victor Chocquet (c. 1877), suggest that for him the relationship between the colour patches on his canvas was equally important. In the years that followed, he systematized his technique into patterns of parallel brushstrokes that gave a new significance to the pictorial surface. An unassuming series of still lifes and self-portraits by Cézanne were painted in 1879–80, and these, when they became known, profoundly impressed the younger generation, who reckoned them to be as monumental as the great art of the past yet in a subtly different way that was inherent in the actual manner of painting.

The style of the 1870s was formless from a traditional standpoint, and, at the beginning of the next decade, Renoir decided that he had gone to the limit with Impressionism and “did not know either how to paint or draw.” Following a trip to Italy, he set about acquiring a wiry, linear style that was the direct opposite of his relaxed, freely brushed manner of earlier years.

The appearance of a new generation posed a fresh challenge. Georges Seurat was moving away from the empirical standpoint of Impressionism toward a technique (Pointillism) and a form that were increasingly deliberately designed. Paul Gauguin, taking his starting point from Cézanne’s style of about 1880, passed from a capricious personal type of Impressionism to a greater use of symbols. He exhibited with the Impressionists from 1880 onward, but it was soon evident that group shows could no longer accommodate the growing diversity. In 1884, after the Salon jury had been particularly harsh, the Société des Artistes Indépendants was formed. The last Impressionist group show was held in 1886. Only Monet and Armand Guillaumin, to whose efforts the group owed much of its eventual recognition, were now in the strict sense Impressionists. Monet, who had exhibited only once since 1879, continued to build on the original foundation of the style, the rendering of visual impression through colour in paintings that studied a single motif in varying lights. For him the formlessness and the homogeneity of Impressionism were its ultimate virtues. In his last series of Water Lilies, painted between 1906 and 1926, the shimmering of light eventually lost its last descriptive content, and only the colour and curling movement of his brush carried a general all-pervading reference to the visual world. Renoir’s later work was equally expansive; his sympathetic vision of humanity revealed its own inherent breadth and grandeur.

Impressionism, in one aspect, continued the main direction of 19th-century painting, and after 1880 the movement was an international one, taking on independent national characteristics. Russia produced an exponent in Isaak Ilich Levitan, and Scotland one in William MacTaggart. In Italy Telemarco Signorini and in the United States such painters as Childe Hassam developed modified forms of the style. In France, and to some extent in Germany with Max Liebermann, Impressionism provided a basis for the styles that followed.