Impressionism

Chapter Overview and Introduction

The late 19th century style of Impressionism was a shocking and controversial style in its time. Impressionism’s revolutionary approach to painting took place within the newly renovated modern city of Paris. Influenced by Japanese prints and photography, Impressionists dramatically changed their approach to pictorial space. The Impressionists introduced new artistic techniques related to pictorial space, texture, color, and light.

Focus Artworks

• Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas
• Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, oil on canvas
• Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, 1874, oil on canvas
• Charles Garnier, The Paris Opéra, 1860-75
• Mary Cassatt, In the Loge, 1878, oil on canvas

Term List

• Salon
• “Impressions”
• Impressionism
• Optical mixing of color
• En plein air
• Café concert
• Photographic snapshot
• Japanese prints
• Japonisme
• Ukiyo-e prints
• Flâneur

Impressionism, an introduction

Apart from the salon

The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition—called the Salon—and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reputation and make a living as an artist). The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury—which could often be quite arbitrary. The artists we know today as Impressionists—Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley (and several others)—could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions was too long. They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it.

The artists pooled their money, rented a studio that belonged to the photographer Nadar, and set a date for their first collective exhibition. They called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and their first show opened at about the same time as the annual Salon in May 1874. The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 through 1886.

The impressionists regarded Manet as their inspiration and leader in their spirit of revolution, but Manet had no desire to join their cooperative venture into independent exhibitions. Manet had set up his own pavilion during the 1867 World’s Fair, but he was not interested in giving up on the Salon jury. He wanted Paris to come to him and accept him—even if he had to endure their ridicule in the process.

Lack of finish

Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Sisley had met through classes. Berthe Morisot was a friend of both Degas and Manet (she would marry Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène by the end of 1874). She had been accepted to the Salon, but her work had become more experimental since then. Degas invited Morisot to join their risky effort. The first exhibition did not repay the artists monetarily but it did draw the critics, some of whom decided their art was abominable. What they saw wasn’t finished in their eyes; these were mere “impressions.” This was not a compliment.

The paintings of Neoclassical and Romantic artists had a finished appearance. The Impressionists’  completed works looked like sketches, fast and preliminary “impressions” that artists would dash off to preserve an idea of what to paint more carefully at a later date. Normally, an artist’s “impressions” were not meant to be sold, but were meant to be aids for the memory—to take these ideas back to the studio for the masterpiece on canvas. The critics thought it was absurd to sell paintings that looked like slap-dash impressions and to present these paintings as finished works.

Landscape and contemporary life

Courbet, Manet and the Impressionists also challenged the Academy’s category codes. The Academy deemed that only “history painting” was great painting. These young Realists and Impressionists questioned the long-established hierarchy of subject matter. They believed that landscapes and genres scenes (scenes of contemporary life) were worthy and important.

Light and color

In their landscapes and genre scenes, the Impressionist tried to arrest a particular moment in time by pinpointing specific atmospheric conditions—light flickering on water, moving clouds, a burst of rain. Their technique tried to capture what they saw. They painted small commas of pure color one next to another. When viewer stood at a reasonable distance their eyes would see a mix of individual marks; colors that had blended optically. This method created more vibrant colors than colors mixed as physical paint on a palette.

An important aspect of the Impressionist painting was the appearance of quickly shifting light on the surface of forms and the representation changing atmospheric conditions. The Impressionists wanted to create an art that was modern by capturing the rapid pace of contemporary life and the fleeting conditions of light. They painted outdoors (en plein air) to capture the appearance of the light as it flickered and faded while they worked.

Reception

By the 1880s, the Impressionists accepted the name the critics gave them, though their reception in France did not improve quickly. Other artists, such as Mary Cassatt, recognized the value of the Impressionist movement and were invited to join. American and other non-French collectors purchased numerous works by the Impressionists. Today, a large share of Impressionist work remains outside French collections.

Impressionist pictorial space

Modern Paris

Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines depicts one of the grand boulevards of Paris. The boulevard was designed by Baron Haussmann in the mid-19th century to cut through the tightly packed medieval center of the city. The unusually high viewpoint of the painting is taken from one of the new multistory, mixed-use commercial and apartment buildings that lined these boulevards. The painting is modern in the very simple sense that its subject would not have been possible fifty years earlier.

Similarly, Degas’s Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs shows a scene in one of the new nightclubs for which Paris became famous in the late nineteenth century. Starting as occasional musical acts in what were called café-concerts, these nightclubs quickly evolved into massive cabarets, often with multiple stages, that included dance revues and acrobatics as well as large orchestras. Degas situates us in the crowded pit of one of these cabarets, looking through a forest of fancy hats and musical instruments at the performers on stage, who glow in the modern gas footlights. Both of these works typify the Impressionists’ exploration of the new spaces of Paris, as well as the new vantage points and ways of seeing that these spaces allowed.

The Creation of Modern Paris: Narrow streets and barricades

During each of the previous political revolts (1789, 1830, 1848, and again in 1871), sections of Paris had succumbed to the revolutionaries. These successes were due in part to the political sympathies of the citizens of Paris, but the crooked narrow lanes of the medieval city also played a role. During times of conflict, urban mobs would blockade the maze that was the streets of Paris. Such barricades proved very effective and made Paris all but uncontrollable at times. Think back to Eugène Delacroix’s painting of the revolution of 1830, Liberty Leading the People—Marianne (Liberty) is shown rising over a barricade of just this sort.

Napoleon III and the Second Empire

During the period known as the Second Empire (1852–70), Napoleon III, the great-nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte (emperor of France in the early 19th century), ruled France. He asked an administrator, Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, to modernize Paris—to bring clean water and modern sewers to the fast growing city, to light the streets with gas lanterns, to construct a central market (Les Halles), and to build parks, schools, hospitals, asylums, prisons, and administrative buildings. But the most ambitious aspect of Haussmann’s plan was to literally reshape the city.

Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris

For his role in changing the Paris cityscape, Haussmann would acquire the nickname “the demolisher.” He plowed over the ancient, winding streets of the city (the same narrow streets that had proved so useful to revolutionaries). In their place, he created broad straight boulevards that were impervious to the barricade—and, equally important, they could better accommodate the free movement of troops.

The avenues also allowed for the easy flow of commerce and so were a boon for business. Napoleon III had dreamed of a new imperial city whose very streets spoke of the glory of the French empire. Haussmann delivered.

As with nearly every urban renovation, a percentage of the population was displaced. Haussmann forced citizens from their homes as these buildings were torn down to make way for the clean lines of the new city. The wealthy were quickly accommodated. The new boulevards were lined with fashionable apartment houses. It was, as usual, the poor that really suffered.

A change in pictorial space

The Impressionists’ treatment of pictorial space was also often unusual. Traditional Academic artists tended to favor centered, closed, and balanced compositions such as David’s Oath of the Horatii, in which the action is carefully staged for the viewer at a measured distance back from the picture plane.

Although we can infer our viewpoint in Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, it is unusual in that the artist gives us no clear place to stand in the work, and the orthogonal lines of the boulevard sweep off the right-hand side of the canvas, as though we were leaning perilously out a window or over a balcony railing. Similarly, Degas’s Le Café-Concert aux Ambassadeurs is remarkable for its failure to use any perspectival techniques to create space for its thicket of bodies, which emphasizes the sense of being jostled in the middle of a crowd.

Even more unusual is Degas’s treatment of pictorial space in his painting At the Races in the Countryside, a scene set at one of the racetracks situated on the outskirts of Paris. The main focus of the work is obvious: the wet nurse and child, who are framed by the carriage door below and by a yellow parasol above, and who are the focus of attention of the child’s mother, the driver of the carriage (Paul Valpinçon, the child’s father), and their dog. This focal point is placed at the exact horizontal center of the canvas, as we might expect, but Degas appears to have achieved this placement at considerable cost to the rest of the composition. The work is egregiously unbalanced, the right hand side being crowded with heavy, dark shapes and the left hand side relatively light and empty. Furthermore, one of the horses is cropped awkwardly at the nose; the legs of both horses and the wheels of the carriage are abruptly truncated; and the carriage on the left, which is already leaning perilously to the right, has had its left supporting wheel cut off by the edge of the canvas. The work has the appearance of an amateur photographic snapshot, where subjects are frequently centered but little attention is paid to what is happening at the edges of the composition.

Unlike a photograph, however, a painting cannot be executed in a fraction of a second, and it would have been remarkably careless if Degas had trapped himself into this unbalanced composition and these odd truncations of the figures by beginning his work in the wrong place or at the wrong scale—or if, when he saw what was happening, he did not correct it. We must conclude that Degas actively sought the effects of imbalance and seemingly arbitrary cropping, no matter how unusual or awkward they may seem. Why? In a review of the second exhibition of the Société anonyme (1876), the critic Edmond Duranty justified these and similar violations of conventional pictorial space and carefully organized compositions by asserting their greater truth to lived visual experience:

“People and things have a thousand ways of being unexpected in reality. Our point of view is not always in the middle of a room with two side walls receding toward the back wall; it does not always arrange the lines and angles of cornices with mathematical symmetry. . . .[One’s viewpoint] is sometimes very high, sometimes very low, sometimes it misses the ceiling, views objects from their undersides, unexpectedly cuts off the furniture. . . .

A man in a room or on a street is not always standing in a straight line at an equal distance from two parallel objects; he is likely to be situated on one side of the space. He is never in the center of the canvas or in the center of the setting. He is not always shown as a whole; sometimes he appears cut off at mid-leg, or half-length, or sliced longitudinally. Sometimes, one sees him very close-up, at full size, while very tiny, far back in the distance appears a crowd in the street or groups assembled in a public place. ^[1]”

Old systems fall apart and new ones take their place

Notice that Duranty justified the radical spatial and compositional effects of Impressionism by describing the new artists’ paintings as more accurate than the established conventions of academic painting. Our views as we move through the world are not always centered and balanced; nor does space always recede with the mathematical regularity typical of traditional academic paintings. The systematic perspectival techniques that had dominated Western art since the Italian Renaissance, and which had been formulated to help make paintings look more true to life, are revealed to be mere artifices. The type of argument Duranty employed becomes a commonplace not only of Impressionism but of other movements as well: surprising new pictorial effects, which at first sight appear to be errors, are justified as being more accurate than the established conventions of past art. In this way modern art can sometimes remind us that what we think of as “realistic” or “natural” really only describes the social and artistic conventions to which we are so habituated that we accept them without question.

Impressionism: painting modern life

Aggressively modern

This is one of many paintings by Monet of the railroad bridge leading to Argenteuil, a small town on the outskirts of Paris where the artist lived in the 1870s. The painting demonstrates the Impressionists’ well-known interest in depicting nature and the effects of weather and light, seen here in the expanse of white clouds in blue sky and the reflections in the rippling surface of the river. Highly textured dark green bushes and grass are built up with visible brushstrokes and anchor the painting’s composition on left and right. The subject of the painting, however, is not a timeless rural scene (these were popular with the public — see, for example, this painting by Corot), but an aggressively modern one of a railroad bridge with a train heading over the river.

The bridge was rebuilt at the beginning of the decade after its predecessor was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian war, and its parts were forged at the local ironworks. The steam engine racing across the bridge creates its own billowing gray steam clouds, competing with the natural ones. The sweeping perspective of the bridge suggests the speed and dynamism of modern transportation technology, but Monet also shows that technology as integrally connected to the natural world. The rickety wooden fence in the foreground creates a contrast between old construction materials and the massive concrete and iron pylons supporting the new bridge. Old and new strain to integrate in the modern landscape.

Subjects that matter

Until the last decades of the twentieth century the scholarship on Impressionism paid relatively little attention to the subject matter chosen by the artists.  Before then, art historians mostly concentrated on the style of the works and the way Impressionist innovations in form heralded or consolidated what seemed to them to be the most significant feature of modern art: the liberation of the artist from the constraints of convention, and the “evolution” of art toward flatness and abstraction. In recent decades, however, art historians have seriously considered the subject matter represented in Impressionist paintings and how this subject matter would have been understood by contemporary viewers.

Painting modern life

The Impressionist style can, of course, be applied to any subject matter, but Impressionist artists concentrated on a surprisingly limited range of subjects: typically, middle-class leisure in modern urban or suburban environments such as the Paris boulevard depicted in Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines or Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil. In one sense, the Impressionists continued the tradition of earlier nineteenth-century Realists like Jean-François Millet (for example in his painting L’Angélus) in their insistence on painting scenes from contemporary life. They rejected historical, mythological, and other exotic subjects and took as their dictum, “Il faut être de son temps,” “one must be of one’s own time.”

However, for the Impressionists, unlike the Realists, contemporary subjects typically did not mean rural or provincial scenes, which often suggested timeless forms of life and labor (as in Millet’s L’Angélus), but rather urban and suburban subjects that were changing rapidly. In this they are among the first artists to examine an important change in human geography that had significantly transformed the human experience: the shift of populations from primarily rural to urban areas that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and its large-scale economic shift from agricultural to industrial production.

In 1863, the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire wrote an influential essay titled “The Painter of Modern Life” that called for an artist who would stroll through the new spaces of the city, keenly observing the actions of its inhabitants and viewing the streets and crowds as though they constituted a sort of improvised theater put on for his observation. Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines presents a characteristically modern scene of the broad, tree-lined boulevards that were cut across the older, less regular streets and alleys of Paris, offering a sweeping perspective that was not previously available in the city.

Although they did not insist upon technological subjects as much as later modern art movements such as Italian Futurism or American Precisionism did, the Impressionists had a recognizable predilection for painting the spaces of Paris as it had been transformed within the past few decades. Along with the more stereotypical plein-air garden and landscape subjects, the Impressionists also frequently turned to scenes of contemporary urban experience. They painted Parisian cafés and beer halls; they painted the large theaters, opera houses, and cabarets of the city’s night-life, illuminated by the eerie green glow of the new gas lighting; they painted the bridges and grand boulevards of modern urban planning; they painted the new train stations, glass-and-iron cathedrals to modern technology and its promise of rapid movement of goods and ease of travel; and they painted the suburban restaurants, racetracks, beach resorts, and parks where the rising middle classes spent their leisure hours.  These subjects may appear charmingly quaint to our eyes, but at the time they were as aggressively contemporary as paintings of skyscrapers, airports, highway rest areas, and office parks would be today.

Middle-class leisure

Also unlike the Realists, the Impressionists tended to paint middle class leisure rather than lower class labor. This is a somewhat surprising limitation. Living alongside affluent urban professionals and moving through the same streets were thousands of poor manual laborers.  But when we examine a panoramic street scene such as Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day—another view of a modern boulevard—it is surprising to note there is only one person on the street whose dress marks him as lower class and whose occupation signals active labor: a distant man carrying a ladder, easily overlooked just to the right of the foreground man’s head. The exceptions to this general rule that the Impressionists painted bourgeois leisure rather than lower-class labor actually help to prove the rule. Impressionist paintings that show lower-class labor tend to depict the support industries of middle-class leisure: café waiters, beer-hall waitresses, cabaret singers, ballet dancers, laundresses, milliners, and prostitutes (and not the labor necessary to maintain the infrastructure of the city and the basic needs of its inhabitants). Even the paintings of lower class labor are fundamentally about middle class leisure.

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise

“Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it … and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in an embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.” Louis Leroy, “Exhibition des Impressionnistes,” Le Charivari (25 April 1874), as translated in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (1946)

The bright, burning orange sun rises in the distance, casting rays of light across a calm morning in the Port of Le Havre. The rippling waters of the port’s inlet create small waves that anticipate the day’s activity. Three fishing boats float into the distance, where construction of a dock is visible through the morning mist. The cool blue, green, and white hues dominating the landscape are interrupted by the sunlight that radiates across the water.

Industry and global exchange

Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is best known for being the painting that established Impressionism as a new movement in art history, as it shocked critics who first saw it in an 1874 exhibition in Paris.

On the surface, the painting appears to capture a quiet morning at Le Havre, but a closer look offers insight into its context. The painting’s material, technique, and subject matter reflects the influence of modernity on artmaking at this time, and also highlights trade networks between France and Japan that gained momentum in the 1860s and 1870s. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise is not only an engaging study of the effects of light and color, but it also reveals a changing world of industry and global exchange in 19th-century France.

Modernity en plein air

Monet’s painting was made shortly after he returned to France from London, where he lived for two years to avoid the Franco-Prussian War. Impression, Sunrise was one of several paintings Monet made during his visit to Le Havre, a major port city in Northern France where he spent most of his childhood. Although the perspective of the scene indicates that Monet painted from his window at the Hôtel de l’Amirauté, the painting captured the fleeting effect of a sunrise on the water.

The expressive movement of Monet’s brush is evident in the streaks of orange, red, pink, gray, blue, and white pigment that blend together to form the misty sky over Le Havre. These painterly brushstrokes reflect a new technique called en plein air (“in open air”), which gained popularity in the 1860s. Artists that worked in this style left their studios to paint outdoors, using rapid brushstrokes to quickly capture the effect of light and color on the atmosphere.

Although Impression, Sunrise was painted in a room overlooking the port, Monet had started experimenting with the plein air technique by 1872, and 1885 painting by John Singer Sargent shows him painting in this style.

The palette in Monet’s left hand is loaded with fresh paint that he carried with him to this destination. He leans forward to add more pigment to the canvas on his easel, which is turned toward the viewer to reveal a loosely painted landscape. Sargent’s rendering also embraced plein air painting, as the artist worked quickly to capture his friend.

Artists who painted en plein air were influenced by new tools for art-making that developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution.  John Rand’s collapsible paint tube, for example, changed the way paint could be stored. For centuries, artists had preserved their expensive pigments in pig’s bladders, but they were unable to be sealed, which meant that paint was sometimes wasted. The collapsible paint tube not only solved this problem because artists could open and close them with a cap, but they also improved the portability of materials. The canvases they painted out in the world were no longer preliminary sketches or studies, but the finished work of art.

Fleeting moments in paint and print

Monet’s composition for Impression, Sunrise was influenced by his interest in and collection of Japanese prints. Prior to 1853 (and for 200 years), Japan had been isolated from the rest of the world. In 1853, American warships were sent on a mission to Tokyo Harbor to pressure Japan to open trade negotiations with the United States and Europe. Japanese prints, fabrics, ceramics, and other art materials flooded European and American shops, and were snatched up by collectors looking for the latest fashionable items.

James Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold depicts a model dressed in a kimono gazing at a collection of prints. Whistler’s painting reflects the prevalence of japonisme, a term that describes the Euro-American fascination with Japanese art and aesthetics at this period. The folding screen creates the impression of a flattened background, which evokes the flatness and closely-cropped compositions of Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

Japonisme coincided with modern art’s radical upending of the Western artistic tradition and had significant effects on Western painting and printmaking. In this regard, Japanese art affected modern art in much the same way that encounters with African and Oceanic art and artifacts did a few decades later. Many late-19th century modern artists not only admired and collected Japanese prints, they derived and adopted both compositional and stylistic approaches from them.

Japanese woodblock prints called ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” were a cheap popular art form in Japan during the Edo Period (1615-1868).  They were associated with urban entertainment districts (the so-called floating world) in Japan and typically portrayed famous actors, courtesans, and wrestlers, as well as landscape views of well-known sites. Ukiyo-e prints first appeared in Europe as packaging material used to protect valuable imported porcelain objects, but they attracted the interest of European artists and art collectors and were soon imported for their own sake.

Claude Monet started building his own collection of Japanese prints in the 1860s. A famous work in his collection was Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake.” Hiroshige’s scene captures a view of the Sumida River during a torrential downpour. People crossing the bridge in the foreground duck under parasols, hats, and blankets to protect themselves from the rain. Through the streaks of rain, a single figure is on the river, guiding their boat through the water. Hiroshige’s scene is closely cropped, giving the viewer a diagonal viewpoint toward the river. The artist uses varying shades of blue to show the sky, distant shore, and river, and dark lines create the impression of moving water and pouring rain.

Impression, Sunrise uses several techniques employed in Sudden Shower, indicating that Monet borrowed from Hiroshige’s print. Instead of using traditional techniques like linear perspective, Monet painted three boats at the center of the work to produce a diagonal line that implies receding space. The sky and water are only distinguishable from each other through the shadowy dock (the Quai au Bois) that stretches from one side of the painting to the other. The painterly brushwork creates an impression of flatness. Hiroshige and Monet both use a cool color palette to evoke the essence of a moment: whereas Hiroshige’s scene shows the power of the yūdachi, a powerful rainfall that darkened the daytime skies, Monet depicts the calm, misty start to a busy day at the sea port.

Industry and trade at the Port of Le Havre

Although Impression, Sunrise was neither Monet’s first, nor his only painting to feature Le Havre, it captures a period of growth for the port, indicative of France’s participation in global trade and commerce. In the 18th century, Le Havre underwent its first major expansion to increase France’s participation in the slave trade, and by the 19th century, it was rebuilt several times to meet the needs of a newly industrialized nation.

Eugène Louis Boudin’s 1887 painting shows Le Havre on a busy day, with boats making their way across the harbor as ships enter to escape the storm clouds billowing in the distance. The dock on the right side of the painting is filled with workers who have already unloaded a ship.

Monet painted several scenes of the port between 1865 and 1880, and they reveal the way that his style and technique developed over time. His 1867 painting of Le Havre shows a busy port scene en plein air, with several shades of green and white to indicate the motion of churning waves. By 1872, Monet had embraced singular, horizontal strokes of dark blue to imply the water’s movement in Impression, Sunrise.

As he painted Impression, Sunrise, the Quai au Bois was being reconstructed as part of a larger project to widen Le Havre’s entrance, and Monet emphasized this industrial progress in the form of cranes silhouetted against the morning sky. In another 1872 painting, Le Havre: Night Effect, Monet painted the same scene at night.  Its predominant shades of black, blue, and gray are interrupted by touches of white, yellow, and red.

Monet’s painterly technique used in the 1872 scenes of Le Havre visually evoked the transitory nature of port life in the 1860s and 70s: it highlights the constant ebb and flow of trade, commerce, and nature. Both paintings are recognizable in that they depict an identifiable subject—but their surfaces have been dematerialized. Monet’s painting is a collection of brushstrokes on a canvas support. It is not a representation of a sunrise but an impression of one.

“A Revolution in Painting!”

On April 15, 1874, eager visitors gathered in a studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris to view one hundred and sixty-five works by members of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. The exhibition took place in a private studio owned by the photographer Nadar, and represented a significant moment in the Parisian art world. The 1874 show highlighted a broad range of artworks that defied the rigid categories embraced by the traditional art world, and Impression, Sunrise was among the most notable of them.

The exhibition marked a public rejection of the Salon system in Paris, and established itself as independent from other official spaces dedicated to art. Although smaller venues existed in which artists could show their work, the Salon had been the primary venue for exhibiting since the 17th century. In the second half of the 19th century, artists more frequently showed their work in spaces free from the constraints of the Salon—but this traditional venue continued to wield significant power in the art world. Although the 1874 show is commonly referred to as “the first Impressionist exhibition,” it was populated by artists who worked in a variety of styles and formats. They consciously departed from Salon practices by hanging their works in two rows so that visitors could clearly see all of them.

Monet exhibited five paintings and seven pastels at the show. Impression, Sunrise captured the attention of critics who were shocked by the work’s sketchiness. In his review of the 1874 show, Louis Leroy disparaged Monet’s painting by comparing it to “wallpaper,” implying that the work had no value or purpose beyond decoration. ^[2]

Monet’s loose brushwork and the subject matter of a modern working port did not reflect the traditional characteristics for high art. It does not depict the mythological or battle scenes embraced by French history paintings, nor does it express an overt moral or political message. Instead, it captures a fleeting moment in time using rapid brushwork and bright colors.

An 1874 cartoon depicts men gasping in horror at the framed paintings in the show. The curved lines on the canvases implies that they are painted en plein air. One figure exclaims, “A Revolution in Painting! And a terrorizing beginning.” Other visitors to the exhibition celebrated Monet’s work for its modern characteristics. Jules-Antoine Castagnary emphasized his ability to capture a subject using an innovative technique, arguing that it depicted “not a landscape, but the sensation produced by a landscape.” ^[3]

On the surface, Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise captures a quiet morning in the port of Le Havre, but a closer look at the work offers insight into many changes taking place in 19th-century Europe. Monet’s work depicts a moment of growth for the port, indicative of France’s participation in global trade and commerce. Moreover, its flattened composition not only reflects Monet’s embrace of new, industrial art materials, but also provides insight into the artist’s collection and study of Japanese prints. Monet’s inclusion of this work in the 1874 exhibition reveals a new moment of painting that departs from past traditions.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette

A French painter, printmaker, and sculptor, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is known for his personal form of Impressionism, creating monumental works inspired by Old Masters.

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Most strongly associated with Realism, Édouard Manet experimented with multiple styles in his pursuit of subject matter that reflected modern urban life. Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère uses Impressionist techniques while maintaining his interest in the new modern world.

Edgar Degas, The Dance Class

Although a founding member of the Impressionists, Edgar Degas regarded himself as a Realist, capturing modern urban life in pastel, paint, and sculpture. The elegance of the performance has been stripped away for an intimate look at off-duty ballerinas.

Charles Garnier, The Paris Opéra

A master of the Beaux-Arts style, Charles Garnier is best known for his design of the Opéra in Paris and his influence on French and American architecture. Seeing and being seen: the opera was a place of voyeurism and spectacle among the prosperous classes of the city.

The Paris Opéra, designed by Charles Garnier, is one of the jewels of Napoleon III’s newly reconstructed city. Frequented by Edgar Degas and the source for much of his ballet imagery, the Paris Opéra is key to understanding the somewhat perverse culture of voyeurism and spectacle among the prosperous classes of the Second Empire.

Art historians Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabel Hyman have called the huge Opéra house,

“the ‘new cathedral’ of bourgeois [middle, really upper-middle class] Paris…. The glittering centerpiece of the new Paris….was meant to be much more than a theater in the ordinary sense. For Charles Garnier, an architect of the École des Beaux-Arts, it was a setting for a ritual in which the spectators were also actors, participants in the rite of social encounter, seeing and being seen.^[4]”

Behind the stage are the rehearsal rooms where Degas often sketched. But the single largest area, from the front façade to the seats below the dome, is reserved for the foyers and the grand stair hall. This area was, in essence, a second stage. Far more ornate then the performance stage, the lobbies of the Paris Opéra were where the social dramas of the rich were enacted.

Strolling along the new boulevards or posing in the opera’s grand foyers, the ruling classes paraded their wealth. The flâneur, a new denizen of the city, was a man of leisure (itself a by-product of the capital generated by industrialization). Walking the streets not for work or need, but for the pleasures of observation, the flâneur was at home in the Opéra.

Mary Cassatt, In the Loge

An American artist active in France, Mary Cassatt was a member of the Impressionists, creating works that reflected upper-class women’s lives.

Conclusion

Impressionists, such as Cassatt, Degas, Renoir, and Monet, are considered painters of modern life. The word “modern” was introduced in the 19^th century and became synonymous with industrialization, capitalism, secularism, and technology. Impressionists captured the new “modern” world of a revitalized Paris with its café concerts, Opera House, and other venues for leisure and entertainment. Working with the techniques of painting en plein air, the optical mixing of colors, and the snapshot effect, the Impressionists transformed the entire idea of what it meant to be an artist in the modern world.

Citation and Licensing

The following sections were written by Chelsea Wright and licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0:

• Chapter Overview and Introduction
• Focus artwork and term list compiled by Chelsea Wright
• Practicing Visual Analysis
• Conclusion

The following articles from Smarthistory licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 were remixed and adapted for the chapter:

• Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic, “Impressionism, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015.
• Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, “Impressionist pictorial space,” in Smarthistory, December 24, 2018.
• Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Haussmann the Demolisher and the creation of modern Paris,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015.
• Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, “Impressionism: painting modern life,” in Smarthistory, April 14, 2019.
• Dr. Maura Gleeson, “Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise,” in Smarthistory, August 8, 2023.
• Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, “Japonisme,” in Smarthistory, June 14, 2020.
• Smarthistory, “Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” in Smarthistory.
• Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette,” in Smarthistory, November 27, 2015.
• Smarthistory, “Édouard Manet,” in Smarthistory.
• Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” in Smarthistory, October 1, 2017.
• Smarthistory, “Edgar Degas,” in Smarthistory.
• Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris, “Edgar Degas, The Dance Class,” in Smarthistory, November 25, 2015.
• Smarthistory, “Charles Garnier,” in Smarthistory.
• Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Charles Garnier, The Paris Opéra,” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015.
• Smarthistory, “Mary Cassatt,” in Smarthistory.
• Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, “Mary Cassatt, In the Loge,” in Smarthistory, December 4, 2015.