Impressionism is perhaps the most important and influential movement of modern painting. It radically changed the way paintings were made, bringing about the idea of irregularity in art. It also kick-started the idea of painting outside. The Impressionists rejected official exhibitions and competitions, instead setting up their own group exhibitions, which gained plenty of negative publicity. However, their paintings became so popular with the general public that Impressionism became a movement and went on to influence the entire direction of art following that point.

It all started in 1874, when a group of young artists who called themselves the “Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.” held an art exhibition in Paris. Margaret Samu, an author from the Met Museum, talks about this in her essay Impressionism: Art and Modernity. The group was unified only by their separation from the Salon, which was an institution for young artists of the time to promote themselves and make connections. It was unheard of to try and become a professional artist without first going through the Salon. In that way, the members of this “society” were essentially just the Indie artists of that time.They had no idea, but they were about to start the biggest art movement of the century. 

Ten days after the exhibition, an art critic named Louis Leroy wrote an article in a satirical magazine called Le Charivari. The article followed Leroy and M. Joseph Vincent, a painting apprentice, as they investigated the art exhibition and made various comments about each painting. As the two men stood in front of one of Claude Monet’s paintings, the following dialogue ensued: 

‘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! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.’ (qtd. in Boudin)

And that is how Impressionism got its name. 

Impressionism radically changed the way paintings were made. Just prior to the 1870s, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro used to sit together on the bank of the Seine and paint landscapes. They aimed to be painters of the real, but not in the sense that was acceptable at the time. Rather than focusing on form and symmetry, they focused on feeling, and evanescence. Many critics bashed impressionism for their “unfinished” and “amateur” qualities, because the style completely abandoned the traditional clarity of form and tight brush strokes used by the old masters (Samu). They discovered that they could use contrasting colors to express light rather than using dark colors, and eventually most of them completely eliminated the color black from their palettes. At this time, the theory of complementaries wasn’t even a thing (Venturi). They didn’t see the world in the abstract, but in relation to the optical effects of light. Their paintings had a fleeting nature--capturing not just the moment but the feeling of the moment, and the ambient features of nature such as changes in weather. Lionello Venturi, an art critic and historian from the early 20th century explains the concept of impressionism’s irregularity well in one of his journals:

Renoir contended that the chief point in any artistic problem was irregularity. He stated that in art as in nature, all beauty is irregular. Two eyes, when they are beautiful, are never entirely alike. The segments of an orange, the foliage of a tree, the petals of a flower are never identical. Beauty of every description finds its charm in variety. Nature abhors both vacuum and regularity. For the same reason, no work of art can really be called such if it has not been created by an artist who believes in irregularity and rejects any set form. Regularity, order, desire for perfection (which is always a false perfection) destroy art. The only possibility of maintaining taste in art is to impress on artists and the public the importance of irregularity. Compare these ideas of Renoir with Aristotle’s definition that beauty consists of grandeur and order, and you will understand the opposition of two different worlds. Impressionists opposed irregularity and variety of sensations to the order of reason. (39-40)

This brings me to my next point, painting En Plein Air. The impressionists became synonymous with the concept of painting outside, or En Plein Air. Prior to the impressionist movement, open air painting was only done in preparation for studio painting. Famous artists at this time were painting in Parisian studios where every variable could be controlled: the lighting, the models, props, etc. The impressionists completed every step of the art process outside in the backyards of their vacation homes in southern France. To paint outside was to give up a lot of control; it might start raining, a cloud might pass over the sun, a breeze might blow the model’s hair in an entirely different direction--but all of this loss of control was part of what made the paintings so great. They felt free, fleeting, real. Painting outside only increased the irregularity of impressionist style, and people loved it.

The impressionist movement is difficult to define. Like its paintings, its life was quite fleeting. The importance of impressionism is its embrace of modernity, which made way for later avant garde art in Europe. In the span of merely ten years, the impressionists themselves had moved on to exploring other painting techniques, leaving Impressionist concepts to bleed into future avant garde work. Impressionism was soon gone with the wind, but it left behind an air of unconventional and uncontrollable creativity.

Works Cited

Boudin, Eugene. “Pictorial. Louis Leroy's scathing review of the First Exhibition of the 

Impressionists.” Arthive, 2 March 2019, 

arthive.com/publications/1812~Pictorial_Louis_Leroys_scathing_review_of

_the_F

irst_Exhibition_of_the_Impressionists. Accessed 14 March 2023.

Samu, Margaret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity: Essay: The Metropolitan Museum 

of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.” The Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, 1 Jan. 1AD, metmuseum.org/toah/hd/imml/hd_imml.htm. 

Venturi, Lionello. “The Aesthetic Idea of Impressionism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and 

Art Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1, 1941, pp. 34–45. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/426742. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.