Impressionism: light, colour and the moment

1Painting what the eye sees, now

Stand by Lake Kivu at sunrise and watch for ten minutes. The water turns from grey to silver to gold, and the hills change colour as the mist lifts. In the 1860s and 1870s a group of young painters in France decided that this was worth painting: not a heroic story, but the changing light of one moment. They carried their easels outdoors and painted fast. Critics laughed at them. Today their paintings are among the most loved in the world, and their way of working is still used by painters who sketch markets, lakes and streets outdoors.

2Key vocabulary

• Impressionism: a movement that began in France in the late 1860s, aiming to capture light, colour and atmosphere at a particular moment.
• En plein air: French for “in the open air”: painting outdoors, in front of the subject.
• Broken colour: short dabs of pure colour placed side by side instead of mixed smoothly on the palette.
• The Salon: the official yearly art exhibition in Paris. Its judges preferred polished paintings of history and myth, the tradition that grew out of Neoclassicism.

3Where it came from

• Rejection: the Salon often refused the young painters' work, so in 1874 they held their own exhibition, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris. They showed together eight times, until 1886.
• The name: a critic, Louis Leroy, mocked Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise and called the whole group “Impressionists”. They took the insult as their name.
• Technology: paint sold in metal tubes (from 1841) made painting outdoors practical; railways carried artists to the countryside and the coast; photography showed new, cropped ways of framing a scene.
• Japanese prints: woodblock prints such as Hokusai's, which you met in the colour unit, showed flat colour and surprising viewpoints.
• Modern life: Paris had new boulevards, cafés, parks and railway stations, and the painters wanted to show them.

4Features of Impressionism

• Painted outdoors and quickly, often in a single session.
• Light and its changes are the real subject: time of day, weather, season.
• Visible, short, broken brushstrokes; soft edges and few outlines.
• Bright, pure colours side by side; little or no black. Shadows are painted in blues and violets.
• Everyday modern subjects: streets, cafés, boating, dancers, gardens, family life.
• Unusual viewpoints and figures cut off at the edge of the picture, like a snapshot.
• Series: Monet painted the same haystacks, cathedral and water-lily pond again and again, in different light.

5Artists and works

• Claude Monet (1840–1926): Impression, Sunrise (1872, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris); the Haystacks series (1890–1891); many paintings of Water Lilies in his garden at Giverny.
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919): crowds in dappled sunlight, as in Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.).
• Edgar Degas (1834–1917): dancers, horse races and cafés, seen from unusual angles and sharply cropped, as in The Dance Class (1874, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). He disliked the name “Impressionist” and worked mostly in his studio.
• Berthe Morisot (1841–1895): the first woman to join the group; she showed The Cradle (1872, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) at the 1874 exhibition. She painted home life and women's lives with quick, feathery strokes.
• Camille Pissarro (1830–1903): the only artist to show at all eight group exhibitions; country scenes and, later, Paris boulevards seen from a window, such as The Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning (1897, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

Worked example: reading Impression, Sunrise

1. Describe: the harbour of Le Havre at dawn. An orange sun and its reflection; small boats as dark shapes; ships' masts and cranes melting into blue-grey mist.
2. Analyse: quick, loose horizontal strokes for the water; hardly any outlines. The orange sun sits against its complementary colour, blue, so it glows. Scientists who study vision have noticed that the sun is painted at almost the same value as the sky: in a black-and-white photograph it nearly disappears. The glow comes from colour contrast, not from light and dark.
3. Interpret: the subject is not the harbour itself but the impression of light and air in one passing moment.
4. Compare: unlike David, Monet tells no story, draws no sharp outlines and leaves every brushstroke visible.

6Look closely

Count the brushstrokes in the reflection of the sun: a handful of orange dabs, and your eye does the rest.

In The Cradle, Berthe Morisot shows her sister Edma watching her sleeping baby through a thin white net. Look at the net: it is made of loose, feathery strokes of white, grey and pink, painted quickly. The diagonal of the mother's arm and the line of the curtain lead your eye to the baby's face. The subject is a quiet, ordinary moment of family life, not a heroic story.

Practice