The term Impressionism was first intended as a biting play on the title of Claude Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise," whose bright dabs of color rendered a fleeting moment in nature -- a subject that seemed trivial in comparison with the carefully... [more]

The term Impressionism was first intended as a biting play on the title of Claude Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise," whose bright dabs of color rendered a fleeting moment in nature -- a subject that seemed trivial in comparison with the carefully modeled historical and mythological narratives that dominated the French Academy. The broken brushstrokes of pure color that once scandalized the public when first exhibited in 1874 are now common on mugs, umbrellas, and calendars, enjoying an undisputed place within our artistic canon and popular culture. The Impressionists drew largely on the innovations of Edouard Manet, often associated with the group, whose paintings of contemporary bourgeois Parisian life adopted a bold, painterly approach that used flat areas of color and isolated brushstrokes to draw attention to the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Also influenced by the intimate open-air paintings of Eugene Boudin, Monet and contemporaries such as Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro went outside to paint the optical splendor of contemporary bourgeois life: bustling streets seen from above, the pull of steam from locomotives, young men and women idling in parks, and the shifting of clouds and trees in the countryside. Caught in the unceasing movement of an increasingly industrial society, these artists sought to capture the ephemeral nature of phenomena before the modern eye. Impressionist paintings captured the way the eye perceives the minute sensations of light and color that converge to describe discernible forms. Such an approach marked a revolutionary shift in the history of painting: from an attempt to model a believable reality within the confines of the canvas to a self-conscious exploration of the nature of perception, which literally dissolved pictorial illusion. [show less]