(c. 1870 - c. 1905)
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(c. 1870 - c. 1905)
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Impressionism Neo-Impressionism
The Impressionist art movement of painting developed in late 19th-century France in reaction against the formalism and sentimentality that characterized the academic art of that time. The Impressionist movement is often considered to mark the beginning of the modern period in art.
Claude Monet |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir |
Alfred Sisley |
Impressionism in painting arose out of dissatisfaction with the classical and sentimental subjects and dry, precise techniques of paintings that were approved by the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and created in studio settings. The Académie traditionally set the standards of French art and sponsored the official Paris Salon exhibitions, which reflected and popularized them. Rejecting these standards, the Impressionists preferred to paint outdoors, choosing landscapes and street scenes, as well as figures from everyday life. Their primary object was to achieve a spontaneous, undetailed rendering of the world through careful representation of the effect of natural light on objects. The foremost Impressionists included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edouard Manet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Also other painters, such as Camille Pissaro, and Mary Cassatt, were part of the movement.
Edgar Degas |
Edouard Manet |
Berthe Morisot |
In academic painting, form was defined and shape modelled by graduated tones; shadows were indicated with black and brown. The Impressionists, by contrast, eliminated minor details. They preferred the primary colours ( red, yellow, and blue) and complementary colours ( green, purple, and orange). They achieved effects of naturalness and immediacy by placing short brushstrokes of these colours side by side, juxtaposing primary colours so that they would appear to blend when viewed from a distance. Juxtaposing a primary colour (such as red) with its complementary colour (green) brought out the vivid quality of each. Thus the Impressionists achieved greater brilliance and luminosity in their paintings than that ordinarily produced by blending pigments before applying them to the canvas. Further, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir discovered that shadows are reflections of the object's own colour.
France 2006. Pane of 10 stamps, dedicated to Impressionism. Issued in a booklet of 10 self-adhesive stamps, which are all so-called NVI (No Value Indicated), and are permanently valid for domestic letters [within France] up to 20 grams. Click on the image to see a large version of the pane. The link will open in a new window. The artists represented on the sheet are (in order of appearance): Gustave Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, Vincent van Gogh, Henri-Edmond Cross, Mary Cassatt, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissaro, and Paul Gauguin. The individual stamps appear on the related artists' biographies.
France 2006. Backside of the same booklet with information on the individual stamps. The cover flap (on the right side) has the same format as the entry-tickets to Musée d'Orsay in Paris, who houses a large number of the original paintings (each of the museum's entry tickets has a different image, and are collector-objects by Impressionist Afficionados). Click on the image to see a large version of the pane. The link will open in a new window.
History
Although the particular characteristics of French Impressionism were
innovative in 19th-century painting, the attempt to depict the effects of
natural light was not new. In the 17th century, Jan Vermeer had used a sharp
contrast of light and shadow to bathe his canvases in natural light. Diego
Velázquez in the 18th century and Francisco de Goya in the early 19th century
conveyed the impression of natural light by eliminating minor shadows and
representing areas of light rather than details of form. Their brushwork is
similar to that of the French Impressionists. The direct precursors of Impressionism were the English
landscape painters John Constable and J. M. W. Turner (see
Romanticism). When Monet and Pissarro first saw their
work, in 1871, they were particularly impressed by Turner's rendering of
atmosphere and his representation of the diffusing effects of light on
solid objects.
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Thirty years before the first
Impressionist exhibition, Camille Corot, an occasional member of the
Barbizon School who is sometimes called the "father of
Impressionism", interpreted the fleeting aspects of changing light in
a series of subjects painted during different hours of the day.
The Barbizon School of painting was also a precursor of the Impressionist movement in France. Particularly many foreign artists who had come to France for educational and inspirational purposes, were followers of this school until they eventually would develop their own style. An example of this is the Romanian painter Stefan Luchian, who has his own page on this site. |
Eugène Louis Boudin, Monet's first teacher, a pre-Impressionist painter of seascapes swiftly executed at their actual locales, taught his successors to convey a feeling of spontaneity, and Gustave Courbet encouraged the Impressionists to seek inspiration from everyday life.
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The term "impressionist" was first used by the journalist Leroy in the Parisian magazine Charivari to characterize derisively a painting by Claude Monet entitled Impression: Sunrise. The term was officially adopted for the Impressionists' third exhibition in 1877. Notable French contemporaries who championed the Impressionists included such literary figures as Émile Zola and Charles Baudelaire, the painter-collector Gustave Caillebotte, and the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Long accustomed to the conventional academic style, the press and public were initially hostile to the new style, but during ensuing years, however, Impressionism gradually won acceptance. |
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The Impressionists developed individual styles and as a group benefited from their common experiments with colour. Monet alone was doctrinaire in applying what had become Impressionist theory. He painted many series of studies -- the cathedral of Rouen, haystacks, a lily pond, and poplars -- each study painted at different times of the day and different seasons of the year. Pissarro used a subdued palette and concentrated equally on the effects of light and on the structure of forms. Sisley, although greatly influenced by Monet, retained his own delicacy of style. Degas, who was not an orthodox Impressionist, caught the fleeting moment, especially in ballet and horse-racing scenes. Renoir preferred to paint the female form rather than pure landscapes. Morisot's subtly painted landscapes gained strength from brushwork rather than colour.
Other members of the Impressionist movement were Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) ("Portraits from the Countryside" 1876) and Henri-Edmond Cross (1856-1910) ("Evening Atmosphere" 1893-1894), who both appear on postage stamps for the first time ever in the above booklet issued by France in 2006.
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French Impressionism was widely influential. Outside France, the
most marked effects of the style were seen in the work of the American painter
J. A. M. Whistler, whose so-called nocturnes (1877) portray such effects as
fireworks or lights shining through mist.
Other artists affected by Impressionism include the Americans Mary Cassatt (who has her own page on this site), Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent, the Englishman Walter Sickert, the Italian Giovanni Segantini, the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind, and the Spaniard Joaquín Sorolla. To this comes a number of painters from the former Eastern Europe, who let themselves influence by the Impressionist movement. Examples are the Romanian painter Stefan Lucian, and a large number of Polish painters, see below. |
France 2001. Johan Barthold Jongkind (1819-1891). "Honfleur at Ebb". (1864). Water Colour.
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Sharjah 1968. Winslow Homer (1836-1910): "Stormy Waters".
Idyllic scenery by Winslow Homer, that could be set anywhere in North America. The image is scanned from a postcard.
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East European Impressionism is -- among others -- philatelically represented on this very attractive set, issued by Poland in 2005, together with a souvenir sheet. Unfortunately Polish Post has given no information about the titles etc. of these art works, only the artist's name is printed on the side of each stamp. But this does not make the set less attractive. See also the Romanian painter Stefan Lucian (link at the bottom of the page).
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The Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Henri Rousseau were greatly influenced by the Impressionists' brilliant use of colour. Cézanne's work anticipated Cubism, while that of Gauguin and van Gogh was an early stage of Expressionism. The Post-Impressionists have their own section on this site.
Sources and links:
Microsoft Encarta 2002.
E.H. Gombrich: "The Story of Art" (Danish Edition ISBN 87-01-79921-5).
Chatou, city in the Impressionist Region of France (in French only).
Impressionist painters on this site (in alphabetical order). Those marked with an asterisk are represented on this page.
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| Revised 27-sep-2006. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1999-2007 Ann Mette Heindorff |
