Impressionism

Impressionism developed in Paris in the 1860s and flourished through the 1880s among a group of young artists who rejected the French Academy's emphasis on historical and mythological subjects rendered with polished, invisible brushwork. Many of the movement's core figures, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, met at Charles Gleyre's studio in the early 1860s and later painted together in the Fontainebleau forest, absorbing the plein-air techniques of predecessors such as Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind and the modern-life subject matter championed by Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. Rather than the academy's 'high finish' and elevated subject matter, they pursued the fleeting sensory impression of a scene, building form from discrete flecks and dabs of pure, often complementary color rather than smooth outlines, so that objects appeared to shimmer and dematerialize under changing light. Their compositions favored casual, seemingly spontaneous arrangements over formal academic staging, and they extended their subjects to landscapes, urban boulevards, railway stations, cafés, and leisure scenes of the rapidly modernizing city. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 interrupted the group (Bazille was killed in battle), but in 1873 the artists formed the Société Anonyme Coopérative d'Artistes to exhibit independently of the official Salon. Their first group show opened in April 1874; when critic Louis Leroy mockingly seized on the title of Monet's Impression, Sunrise to deride the show, the name 'Impressionism' stuck and was soon embraced by the artists themselves. Seven more independent exhibitions followed through 1886, featuring Berthe Morisot (the only woman in the first show), Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Gustave Caillebotte alongside the founding members. By the early 1880s the group began to dissolve as individual artists pursued increasingly personal directions, several of which fed directly into Post-Impressionism. Impressionism fundamentally shifted painting's purpose from depicting elevated subject matter toward personal perception and the study of light and color itself, providing the technical and philosophical foundation for nearly all subsequent modern art movements.