In his 1869 La Grenouillère ( 29.100.112), for example, Monet’s characteristically loose painting style complements the leisure activities he portrays. The boating and bathing establishments that flourished in these regions became favorite motifs. While some of the Impressionists, such as Pissarro, focused on the daily life of local villagers in Pontoise, most preferred to depict the vacationers’ rural pastimes. New railway lines radiating out from the city made travel so convenient that Parisians virtually flooded into the countryside every weekend. Several of them lived in the country for part or all of the year. Such images of suburban and rural leisure outside of Paris were a popular subject for the Impressionists, notably Monet and Auguste Renoir. Depicted in a radically cropped, Japanese-inspired composition, the fashionable boater and his companion embody modernity in their form, their subject matter, and the very materials used to paint them. Édouard Manet’s 1874 Boating ( 29.100.115), for example, features an expanse of the new cerulean blue and synthetic ultramarine. The nineteenth century saw the development of synthetic pigments for artists’ paints, providing vibrant shades of blue, green, and yellow that painters had never used before. The paints themselves were more vivid as well. Many of the independent artists chose not to apply the thick golden varnish that painters customarily used to tone down their works. In addition to their radical technique, the bright colors of Impressionist canvases were shocking for eyes accustomed to the more sober colors of academic painting. This seemingly casual style became widely accepted, even in the official Salon, as the new language with which to depict modern life.

The artists’ loose brushwork gives an effect of spontaneity and effortlessness that masks their often carefully constructed compositions, such as in Alfred Sisley’s 1878 Allée of Chestnut Trees ( 1975.1.211). Rather than neutral white, grays, and blacks, Impressionists often rendered shadows and highlights in color. It demonstrates the techniques many of the independent artists adopted: short, broken brushstrokes that barely convey forms, pure unblended colors, and an emphasis on the effects of light. Their work is recognized today for its modernity, embodied in its rejection of established styles, its incorporation of new technology and ideas, and its depiction of modern life.Ĭlaude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris) exhibited in 1874, gave the Impressionist movement its name when the critic Louis Leroy accused it of being a sketch or “impression,” not a finished painting. The exhibiting collective avoided choosing a title that would imply a unified movement or school, although some of them subsequently adopted the name by which they would eventually be known, the Impressionists. Edmond Duranty, for example, in his 1876 essay La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), wrote of their depiction of contemporary subject matter in a suitably innovative style as a revolution in painting. While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketchlike appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction of modern life. The independent artists, despite their diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group. The group was unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon, for which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected artworks and awarded medals.

Its founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro, among others.

organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism.

In 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.

Claude monet hd impression sunrise