Impressionism is the most popular art movement in the world and it began as a failure. A group of painters who could not get into the official Salon rented a photographer's studio, hung their own show, and were laughed at in the press. Their name comes from that review.
What follows is what actually happened, why the paintings look the way they do, and which of the people involved are worth your wall. Everything mentioned is in our Impressionist Masters collection.
April 1874: The Show That Named Itself by Accident
In nineteenth century France there was effectively one way to have a career: the Salon, a juried state exhibition where acceptance meant sales and rejection meant obscurity. The jury liked finish, mythology, history and brown. It did not like loose paint or ordinary life.
So in April 1874 about thirty artists put on their own show in a photographer's old studio on the Boulevard des Capucines. No jury, no prizes, everyone paid in. Among the works was a small harbour scene Monet had titled, more or less at random because the catalogue demanded a name, Impression, Sunrise.
A critic named Louis Leroy wrote it up for the satirical paper Le Charivari as a comic dialogue, in which he and an imaginary companion wander the show going slowly mad. Wallpaper in its early stages, he said, is more finished than that seascape. He headlined the piece The Exhibition of the Impressionists.
The painters, who until then had been calling themselves a limited company of artists, took the joke and used it. There were eight of these shows between 1874 and 1886. Impression, Sunrise (1872) is where the name came from.
What Actually Changed: Tubes, Trains and Going Outside
The romantic story is that a few geniuses decided to see differently. The duller and truer story involves a hardware change.
Until the 1840s, paint was stored in pig bladders that you punctured and could not reseal. Painting outdoors was possible but miserable, so artists made sketches outside and produced the real painting indoors, from memory, in a studio brown. In 1841 an American portrait painter patented the collapsible metal paint tube. Renoir put it plainly: without paint in tubes there would have been no Impressionism.
Add cheap rail travel out of Paris and portable easels, and a painter could be standing in a field at seven in the morning with twenty colours that would still be usable at noon. The Garden in Pontoise (1874) and Houses at Bougival (1870) are what that made possible.
The visible consequences are consistent across all these painters. Shadows contain colour. Brushstrokes stay separate. Edges are soft because the eye does not actually see hard outlines. And the subject is ordinary: a garden, a boulevard, a woman with a parasol.
The People
Renoir is the warmest of them and the one most interested in pleasure. Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) is an open-air dance hall in Montmartre on a Sunday afternoon, and the hard part he set himself was dappled light: sun coming through leaves onto faces and shoulders that will not hold still. He carried the canvas across Paris and back for months to do it in front of the subject.
The Grand Boulevards (1875) and Woman With A Parasol In A Garden (1875) are the same painter on the street and in the garden.
Monet is the purest case: he spent sixty years on the single question of what light does. Monet's Garden at Argenteuil (1873), Woman with a Parasol (1875) and Water Lilies (1915) span forty years of it. Our Monet piece follows the whole arc.
Pissarro was the only one who showed in all eight exhibitions, and he was the group's conscience and teacher. He mentored Cezanne and Gauguin, and was the oldest of them by a decade.
Caillebotte is the odd one and increasingly the favourite. He was wealthy, which meant he could buy his friends' unsellable paintings, and he did, then left the collection to France. His own work is sharper and more geometric than theirs. Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), Young Man at His Window (1875), Man Drying His Leg (1884) and Boating on the Yerres (1877) show a painter who liked hard edges and unglamorous private moments.
Berthe Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight shows. Women were not admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at the time, so she trained privately and painted the world she was permitted to move in, which turned out to be an advantage: domestic, close-range, and looser in handling than almost any of the men. Girl In A Boat With Geese (1889) is a good example of how little she needed to state.
Frederic Bazille should have been one of the major figures. He shared a studio with Monet and Renoir and paid their rent. He enlisted in the Franco-Prussian War and was killed in 1870 at twenty-eight, four years before the first exhibition. Fisherman with a Net (1868) is most of what he left.
It Crosses the Atlantic
American painters came to Paris, learned the method, and took it home to a country the French had never painted. The Avenue in the Rain (1917) and Lower Manhattan (1910) are Childe Hassam applying it to New York, and our Hassam piece covers him in full.
Summer Day Gloucester Massachusetts (1895), Hollyhocks (c. 1912) and At Calcot (1916) show the same transplant in New England, in a garden and in an English meadow.
The Wheat Field (1875) and Delaware Valley (1865) are George Inness, who got to a similar softness on his own terms without going through Paris at all.
Living With Impressionism
It needs light. This is the practical thing nobody says. Impressionist paintings are built on colours of similar brightness sitting next to each other, and that relationship only works when there is enough light to tell them apart. In a dark hallway, a garden painting collapses into grey-green mush.
It rewards distance. Hang it where people stand back. Up close the strokes separate and the image dissolves, which is fascinating but not what you want above a sofa people sit on.
It does not fight furniture. Because these paintings have no hard edges and no single dark focal point, they sit calmly behind lamps, plants and shelves in a way that a sharp-edged painting never does.
Frames: gold for gardens and figures, silver for water and grey weather, dark bronze for the city and the rain. Ornate suits them better than plain, because the paintings themselves are soft and need the edge to be firm.
Frequently Asked Questions
What defines an Impressionist painting?
Visible separate brushstrokes, colour in the shadows, soft edges, ordinary modern subjects, and an interest in a specific moment of light. Most were begun or finished outdoors in front of the subject, which was itself new.
Was Impressionism really rejected at first?
Yes, and by more than critics. The first exhibition in 1874 lost money, the name came from a hostile review, and several of the painters were poor into middle age. Monet was writing to friends about having no bread while making work that now hangs in every major museum on earth.
How are your prints made?
Each is printed to order on archival canvas from a high resolution scan, stretched over an Appalachian Poplar stretcher bar, and finished in an ornate resin frame in gold, silver or dark bronze. The workshop photographs here are our own benches. Nothing is warehoused, so your piece is made after you order it.
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