Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists, who began exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.

Overview

Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colors, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugene Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the world. Previously, not only still lifes and portraits, but also landscapes, had been painted indoors, but the Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details. They used short, "broken" brush strokes of pure and unmixed color, not smoothly blended, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense color vibration.

Although the rise of Impressionism in France happened at a time when a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, were also exploring plein-air painting, the Impressionists developed new techniques that were specific to the movement. Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of color.

The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the approval of the art critics and establishment.

By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

Painters known as Impressionists

The central figures in the development of Impressionism in France, listed alphabetically, were:

* Frédéric Bazille
* Gustave Caillebotte (who, younger than the others, joined forces with them in the mid 1870s)
* Mary Cassatt (American-born, she lived in Paris and participated in four Impressionist exhibitions)
* Paul Cézanne (although he later broke away from the Impressionists)
* Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term Impressionist, but is considered one, due to his loyalty to the group)
* Armand Guillaumin
* Édouard Manet (who did not regard himself as an Impressionist, but is generally considered one)
* Claude Monet (the most prolific of the Impressionists and the one who most clearly embodies their aesthetic)[13]
* Berthe Morisot
* Camille Pissarro
* Pierre-Auguste Renoir
* Alfred Sisley

Among the close associates of the Impressionists were several painters who adopted their methods to some degree. These include Giuseppe De Nittis, an Italian artist living in Paris who participated in the first Impressionist exhibit at the invitation of Degas, although the other Impressionists disparaged his work.[14] Federico Zandomeneghi was another Italian friend of Degas who showed with the Impressionists. Eva Gonzalès was a follower of Manet who did not exhibit with the group. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born painter who played a part in Impressionism although he did not join the group and preferred grayed colors. Walter Sickert, an English artist, was initially a follower of Whistler, and later an important disciple of Degas; he did not exhibit with the Impressionists. In 1904 the artist and writer Wynford Dewhurst wrote the first important study of the French painters to be published in English, Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development, which did much to popularize Impressionism in Great Britain.

By the early 1880s, Impressionist methods were affecting, at least superficially, the art of the Salon. Fashionable painters such as Jean Beraud and Henri Gervex found critical and financial success by brightening their palettes while retaining the smooth finish expected of Salon art.[15] Works by these artists are sometimes casually referred to as Impressionism, despite their remoteness from Impressionist practice.

As the influence of Impressionism spread beyond France, artists, too numerous to list, became identified as practitioners of the new style.

Some of the more important examples are:

* The American Impressionists, including Frederick Carl Frieseke, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Lilla Cabot Perry, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir
* Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann, and Max Slevogt in Germany
* Konstantin Korovin and Valentin Serov in Russia
* Francisco Oller y Cestero, a native of Puerto Rico, who was a friend of Pissarro and Cézanne
* Laura Muntz Lyall, a Canadian artist
* Władysław Podkowiński, a Polish Impressionist and symbolist
* Nazmi Ziya Güran, who brought Impressionism to Turkey
* Chafik Charobim, who was a well known impressionist painter in Egypt

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