Impressionism summary

Impressionism, Movement in art that developed in France in the late 19th century. In painting it included works produced c. 1867–86 by a group of artists who shared approaches, techniques, and discontent with academic teaching, originally including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot. Later Édouard Manet, whose earlier style had strongly influenced several of them, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and others joined them. The identifying feature of their work was an attempt to record a scene accurately and objectively, capturing the transient effects of light on colour and texture. To this end they abandoned the traditional muted browns, grays, and greens in favour of a lighter, more brilliant palette; stopped using grays and blacks for shadows; built up forms out of discrete flecks and dabs of colour; and often painted out of doors, rather than in the studio. They abandoned traditional formal compositions in favour of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame, and their subject matter included landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations. After the French Academy’s Salon consistently rejected most of their works, they held their own exhibition in 1874; seven others followed. A critic described them derisively as “impressionists,” and they adopted the name as an accurate description of their intent. Before dissolving in the late 1880s, the group had revolutionized Western painting. See also Post-Impressionism; Salon des Indépendants.