What is Impressionism?

Introduction 

Impressionism was an art movement that swept through the late nineteenth century, experimenting with new practices in order to try and capture the feeling, atmosphere, and transience of modernity. Impressionist paintings often were characterized by short, visible brush strokes on canvas, bold colors, and a desire to portray light and movement to give an impression of fleeting, everyday life.

On its surface, Impressionism can be thought of simply as the painterly style practiced by a handful of artists whose work was included in the eight Impressionist exhibitions that took place in Paris between 1874 and 1886. However, a deeper look exposes Impressionism as a profound artistic revolt, not only felt within the walls of Parisian galleries but also across literature and music, that posed questions of how to engage with and represent reality. As André Dombrowski writes, Impressionism 

This study guide paints a broad picture of the art movement as an aesthetic force, tracing its influences, main techniques, impact on other art forms, and lasting impressions on art and culture. 

Impressionism’s beginnings 

Although the term “Impressionism” would come later, the movement began in Paris in the early 1860s when a group of artists came together to study in an informal art school under the direction of Charles Gleyre. David W. Galenson identifies Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir as the four painters who would go on to become “the core group of the Impressionists” (Painting Outside the Lines, 2009). Under Gleyre’s tutelage, as Nathalia Brodskaïa documents, the students received “traditional classical education”, studying precise techniques, nudes, and pieces derived from biblical scenes or ancient mythology (Impressionism: 120 Illustrations, 2022). These were the prevailing styles of the day favored by the École des beaux-arts (the School of Fine Arts in Paris, which held a lot of authority and prestige in artistic circles and organized high-profile exhibitions such as ‘the Salon’). The School extolled linear perspectives, high finishes and historical or neo-classical pieces, exemplified by pieces like Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea (1890) or The Birth of Venus (1863) by Alexandre Cabanel.

However, while these practices offered formal training and an understanding of technique, they did not inspire this collective of painters. Instead, as Renoir stated, it was “our discovery of nature really captured us” (Renoir, quoted in Brodskaïa, 2022).

The Impressionists rejected studio work and along with it, many of the formal practices of the time. Instead of working from imagination or scriptures in a studio, they took their work outside in the pursuit of, as Galenson summarizes, “capturing the momentary effects of the atmosphere” (2009). Théodore Duret, who was one of the first critical advocates of the Impressionists, reflects: 

Through observation as opposed to imagination, the Impressionists sought to capture the subtle hues and angles as the eye perceived them, to more truthfully represent the feeling of their lived experiences. Through a practice of open-air painting — what was called plein d'air — the artists were rebelling through not only the content of the prevailing art practices but also the techniques they were employing and their way of working. As Brodskaïa writes,

The artists experimented with techniques to capture the changeability of the light and the movement that nature necessitates. They diverted from the highly polished paintings favored by the École des beaux-arts and embraced a more unrefined, unfinished or ‘fuzzy’ style, comprised of short, quick brush strokes or dabs and vibrant colors, as seen in the bright greens and shadows in Sisley’s Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud (see Figure 1). 

Fig. 1. Alfred Sisley (1867) Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud. (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

The artists often painted together outdoors, quickly capturing their observations on canvas. Galenson also highlights their style of working together as different from the traditional practices:

The core group of Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille were soon joined by others: among them were Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Armand Guillaumin. Knowing that they were unlikely to be supported by the official Salon or commercial galleries, the group — led by Monet — decided to organize their own exhibition. This opened on 15 April 1857 in Paris, and included work by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Guillaumin, Morisot, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Zacharie Astruc, Eugène Boudin, Marie Bracquemond, Henri Rouart, and Cézanne, under the collective name of La Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs etc (Bernard Denvir, The Impressionists at First Hand, 2023).

This show was not one that was celebrated by the public or the Academié. An especially damning review by Louis Leroy in the illustrated magazine, Le Charivari, titled “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” singled out Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) as an unfinished and indefinite sketch rather than a finished piece of work (see Figure 2). 

Fig. 2. Claude Monet (1872) Impression, Sunrise (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Although this was a hostile review, Leroy’s assessment speaks to exactly what the art movement was attempting to capture: an affective impression of a time and place, where the hazy colors and loose brushstrokes come together to offer a fleeting feeling of a sunrise over the Le Havre port. Although Marnin Young points out that the terms “impression,” “impressionism” and “impressionist” were in use before Impression, Sunrise and Leroy's review, the critique is often cited as the instance where the group’s namesake was galvanized: they were now the Impressionists (“Impressionism and Criticism”, A Companion to Impressionism, 2021).  

The group would go on to present seven further group exhibitions in Paris, with the last one held in 1886. In these exhibitions, they presented a variety of paintings and sculptures, with a diverse array of styles and subjects, and a shifting membership. The Impressionists and their work quickly became popular amongst the public. From their experiments and showcases, their style would permeate the artistic fabric of the time, influencing many artists and inspiring more change, long after their last group exhibition. 

Main techniques 

Although unified by a general resistance to traditional art practices and a shared vision for change, the Impressionists as a collective did not have one cohesive or set style. As Denvir notes, the artists were “[b]ound together by the loosest of ties, dependent as much on social affinities as on shared aesthetic beliefs, but all of them were resolved to avoid ‘tame’ painting” (2023). What follows are some artistic techniques and tendencies found across Impressionist works, including the documentation of modern life and domesticity, their painting techniques and perspectives. 

Modern life 

Impressionists documented their everyday life in reaction to the changing times inspired by modernity, including the increase in middle-class leisure activities in Paris. Madelynn Dickerson identifies the focus on “leisure and café scenes, landscapes, cityscapes, and genre scenes” (The Handy Art History Answer Book, 2013). Many of these works took to the streets of Paris, presenting the vibrant city life, like Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre (1897), which presents the bustle of traffic, wagons, horse-drawn coaches, trees, and pedestrians, which all coalesce together to offer an impression of the street (see Figure 3).

Fig. 3. Camille Pissarro (1897) Boulevard Montmartre (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Other popular subjects were cafes, dance halls, and brothels. 

Scholarship on Impressionism often focuses on the male painters and the core group that sparked the movement, who, as Anne Higonnet notes, themselves “harboured skepticism by and about ‘ladies’” (“Critical Impressionism,” A Companion to Impressionism, 2021). Excluded from the bourgeois and often dismissed by critics, women did not always have the same access to the imagery most associated with Impressionism’s depiction of modern life, such as bars, boulevards, and dance halls. As a result, Impressionist paintings by women often depicted modern life through scenes of domesticity. Painters like Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Marie Bracquemond all experimented with ways to render sensation through art in different ways, offering glimpses of the quotidian experience. We can see this in pieces like Morisot’s In the Dining Room (1886), where the short brushstrokes create a sense of unrest and emotional charge (see Figure 4). 

Fig. 4. Berthe Morisot (1886) In the Dining Room (Uploaded to Picryl)

Short, visible brushstrokes 

Perhaps one of the most famous examples of Impressionism’s brushstrokes is Monet’s The Water Lily Pond (1899), where the paint is rapidly applied to canvas to render the scene’s atmosphere more fully, instead of carefully blending tones and colors together to create more of a realistic image. This breaks up the color, and results in a patchwork of colors and strokes, which allows for light to be played with in a more experimental manner. This can sometimes give a hazy effect, as in Impression, Sunrise or Renoir’s Picking Flowers (1875) (see Figure 5).

Fig. 5. Auguste Renoir (1875) Picking Flowers (Uploaded to Picryl)

Focus 

Within the new vistas, a focus not on detail but on the overall impression of a scene can be seen across many different Impressionist works. This destabilized the notion of linear perspective. For example, as Brodskaïa notes

In paintings like Sisley’s le Saint-Denis (1872), seen in Figure 6, the reflections on the water leading to the foliage and, above, to the vast sky flecked with clouds, all draw the eye past the foreground. 

Fig. 6. Alfred Sisley (1872) le Saint-Denis (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Perception and sensation

Impressionists sought, as Lauren Jimerson writes, to render sensation through their artwork (Painting her Pleasure, 2023). What is crucial here is the Impressionists’ interest in depicting life as the subject experiences it themselves, and how the human brain works and receives information. For example, Monet’s Bathers at La Grenouillère (1869) offers no focus or detail, but rather, it mirrors how we might perceive a snapshot like this ourselves, as dancing light on moving parts, where it might take a moment to comprehend the bathers in the water at the top right of the painting, in a flurry of wider activity as the eye moves across the canvas (see Figure 7). 

Fig. 7. Claude Monet, (1869) Bathers at La Grenouillère (Uploaded to Wikiart)

Literary Impressionism 

In literature, Impressionism can be seen in texts that focus on subjectivity, or a character’s unique perception of their senses, that were emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Fried, What Was Literary Impressionism?, 2018). Abstract association acts in a similar way to the unblended strokes of paint on a canvas, where the reader may have to read between the lines to derive the text’s meaning. Elsewhere, specific or odd details may be presented, rather than meticulously mapping out the entire event. 

Literary Impressionism is exemplified in Joseph Conrad’s famous declaration: 

Conrad achieves this by offering vibrant and complex interrogations of interiority. For example, in Almayer’s Folly, Conrad describes a scene, where the impressionistic rendering of the character Almayer’s sensory perception compounds the tension in the text:

The narrative follows Almayer’s line of vision and the sensations of the blazing sun and the intense colors, to render the feeling of “oblivion” (1895).

Many authors employed Literary Impressionism, including Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, and Aleksey Remizov. It also can be seen to have influenced many more literary movements, such as modernist literature, and artistic expressions, such as Imagism.

Musical Impressionism 

Like Impressionism within art and literature, Impressionism in music also focused on emotion and feeling. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, classical musicians like Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Orrorino Respighi, and Erik Satie experimented with harmonies, forms, timbre, tonalities, rhythm, and orchestration to enable an intense sense of atmosphere and affect. Departing from the drama of Romantic music, Impressionism had a narrower focus, often on the quieter side, with a greater sense of flow that did not adhere to any fixed rhythm or tempo. 

Impressionism’s lasting impressions 

Impressionism had a remarkable impact on art and culture. As Dombrowski writes, so much was at stake “when Impressionism blasted the world of painting wide open,” where there were aftershocks across artistic, aesthetic, phenomenological, and socio-political spheres (2021). Different elements of impressionistic thought can be seen to have shaped so much of what followed at the fin-de-siècle and throughout the twentieth century. For example, as Galenson writes, the

Impressionism’s most overt influence can be seen in Post-Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism and Expressionism, which extended Impressionism beyond its naturalistic depiction of light and color, to encompass more distortion and modified shapes and colors (Brodskaïa, Post-Impressionism, 2023). 

Impressionism shaped many modernist experiments too, in their rendering of interiority and play with perception, such as Virginia Woolf’s radical configuration of color and light in her short story “Kew Gardens” (1919) where petals are seen from the perspective of a snail as “red, blue or yellow lights passed one over the other; staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour” (Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works, 2021). Impressionism and its resistance to depicting the world in a polished or idealized state, and its desire to capture the fleeting or the fragmentary is still very alive today. Its influence can be felt in the stirring of emotion and a mode of perception in art, the music we listen to, the films we watch, and the books we read. As Jesse Matz reflects on our contemporary moment, “Impressionism is everywhere” (Lasting Impressions, 2017). 

Further reading on Perlego

Auguste Renoir (2023) by Patrick Bade 

Manet: A Symbolic Revolution (2018) by Pierre Bourdieu

Impressionism: A Feminist Reading (2019) by Norma Broude

Paul Gauguin: The Mysterious Centre of Thought (2014) By Dario Gamboni

Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, Art (2017) by Laura Anne Kabla

Impressionism between art and science (2020) Edited by Gérard Mourou et al.  

Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (2014) by Philip Nord 

External resources 

Adams, S. (1994) The Barbizon School and the origins of impressionism. Phaidon.

Feist, P. H. (2010) Impressionist art : 1860-1920. Taschen.

Jones, M. & Cooper, P. (1994) Impressionism. Phaidon.

Nagel, J. (1980) Stephen Crane and literary impressionism. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Rubin, J. H. (1999) Impressionism. Phaidon.

Bibliography 

Brodskaïa, N. (2014) Impressionism. Parkstone International. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3733624

Brodskaïa, N. (2022) Impressionism: 120 illustrations. Parkstone International. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3803437 

Brodskaïa, N. (2023) Post-Impressionism. Parkstone International. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3733803

Conrad, J. (2017) Almayer’s Folly. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1653663 

Conrad, J. (2017) The N*gger of the Narcissus. Delphi Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1653675 

Denvir, B. (2023) The Impressionists at First Hand. 2nd edn. Thames and Hudson Ltd. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4214742 

Dickerson, M. (2013) The Handy Art History Answer Book. Visible Ink Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3802035 

Dombrowski, A. (2021) “Introduction,” in Dombrowski, A. (ed.) A Companion to Impressionism. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2866950

Duret, T. (1910) Manet and the French Impressionists. Translated by Crawford Flitch, J.E. G. Richards. 

Galenson, D. (2009) Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. Harvard University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1147981

Fried, M. (2018) What Was Literary Impressionism? Belknap Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1132871 

Higonnet, A. (2021) “Critical Impressionism: A Painting by Mary Cassatt and Its Challenge to the Social Rules of Art,” in Dombrowski, A. (ed.) A Companion to Impressionism. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2866950 

Jimerson, L. (2023) Painting her pleasure: Three women artists and the nude in avant-garde Paris. Manchester University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4312781 

Matz, J. (2017) Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture. Columbia University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/774019 

Woolf, V. (2021) Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works. Griffin Classics. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2162297 

Young, M. (2021) “Impressionism and Criticism,” in Dombrowski, A. (ed.) A Companion to Impressionism. Wiley-Blackwell. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2866950 

Artwork

Cabanel, A. (1863) The Birth of Venus [Oil on canvas] The Metropolitan Art Museum (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Gérôme, J. (1890) Pygmalion and Galatea [Oil on canvas] The Metropolitan Art Museum (Uploaded on Wikimedia Commons)

Monet, C. (1869) Bathers at La Grenouillère [Oil on canvas] The National Gallery, London (Uploaded to Wikiart)

Monet, C. (1872) Impression, Sunrise [Oil on canvas] Musée d’Orsay (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Morisot, B. (1886) In the Dining Room  [Oil on canvas] National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Uploaded to Picryl)

Pissarro, C. (1897) Boulevard Montmartre [Oil on canvas] The Metropolitan Art Museum (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)

Renoir, A. (1875) Picking Flowers [Oil on canvas] National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Uploaded to Picryl)

Sisley, A. (1867) Avenue of Chestnut Trees at La Celle-Saint-Cloud [Oil on canvas] Southampton City Art Gallery (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 2021)
Sisley, A. (1872) le Saint-Denis [Oil on canvas] Musée d’Orsay (Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons)