Impressionism

Impressionism is an art movement dating from 1860. The gallery holds 24,342 works in this movement, including works by Thomas Eakins, Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet. Browse Impressionism paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Impressionism emerged in France in the 1860s and crystallised in Paris in the 1870s, as a loose circle of painters broke from the rigid hierarchies of the official Salon and its academic taste. Calling themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs, some thirty artists mounted their own independent show in April 1874 in the former studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des Capucines. The critic Louis Leroy, reviewing it for the satirical paper Le Charivari, seized on the title of Claude Monet's hazy harbour scene Impression, Sunrise (1872) and derisively dubbed the group "Impressionists" — a jeer the painters soon adopted as their banner. The movement was inseparable from the rapidly modernising world of Haussmann's Paris: railways, boulevards, cafés, riverside leisure, and the changeable light of the Île-de-France.

What united the Impressionists was less a manifesto than a way of seeing. They sought to capture fleeting effects of light, weather, and atmosphere at a precise moment rather than to render timeless, finished subjects. Many worked en plein air, painting outdoors to record sensation directly, and replaced smooth academic blending with rapid, broken brushwork — short dabs of largely unmixed colour set side by side so the eye fuses them at a distance, yielding a heightened luminosity. Shadows became coloured rather than brown or black, and ordinary modern life supplied the subjects.

Monet was the movement's standard-bearer, alongside Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne in his early years, and Berthe Morisot, who showed in seven of the eight group exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886 and helped organise the last. Édouard Manet, though a crucial elder influence, never exhibited with them. Our collection holds Monet's luminous Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son (1875) and Degas's The Dancing Class, the latter typifying his unconventional, candid framing of Parisian life, as well as Henry Lerolle's Impressionist-inflected The Organ Rehearsal.

Impressionism transformed the course of Western art. It built on the open-air naturalism of the Barbizon School and Realism of Courbet and Corot, drew compositional daring from Japanese prints (Japonisme), and in turn opened the door to Neo-Impressionism's pointillism (Seurat) and the Post-Impressionism of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin — paving the way toward twentieth-century modernism.