What is Impressionism?

Impressionism was a French art movement of the 1860s to 1880s that broke with the academic tradition by prioritising the direct observation of light and atmosphere over narrative content. Its painters worked quickly, often outdoors, using visible brushstrokes and pure colour to record the shifting appearance of everyday scenes rather than smoothing them into finished studio compositions.

When did Impressionism start?

The movement crystallised in December 1873 when Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and others founded the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres to bypass the official Salon. Their first independent exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 at the photographer Nadar's former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines, giving the movement its public debut.

Who are the most famous Impressionist painters?

The core Impressionist circle was Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley and Mary Cassatt, with Édouard Manet as a precursor and mentor figure. Eight group exhibitions followed between 1874 and 1886, after which the members dispersed into distinct directions: Monet pursued his series paintings of Rouen Cathedral and haystacks, Degas focused on figures, and Renoir turned towards a more classical manner.

What defines the Impressionist style?

Four technical features distinguish Impressionism: broken colour applied in short separate strokes rather than blended on the palette, visible brushwork that acknowledges the painting as a constructed object, plein air practice using portable easels and tube paints, and an interest in fugitive effects of light, weather and time of day. Monet's series of the same motif under different conditions made this the movement's defining ambition.

Why was Impressionism controversial at the time?

The Paris art establishment considered finished paintings to have smooth invisible surfaces, elevated historical or mythological subjects, and idealised figures. Impressionist canvases broke every rule: brushstrokes remained visible, subjects were ordinary bourgeois life, and compositions looked unfinished. The critic Louis Leroy coined the movement's name in an 1874 review mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and the term stuck despite its intended insult.

What is the difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism?

Impressionism (1870s and 1880s) recorded the visible world's surface appearance under changing light. Post-Impressionism (roughly 1886 to 1905) started from that foundation but pushed in symbolic, structural and emotional directions that the original group had avoided. Cézanne sought underlying geometry, Van Gogh used colour for emotional effect, Gauguin pursued spiritual simplification, and Seurat developed pointillism: four different rebellions against the parent movement.

Where can I see the best Impressionist paintings?

The largest concentrations are in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie (including Monet's Water Lilies rooms), the Art Institute of Chicago (home to Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day and a deep Monet and Renoir holding), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Courtauld Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Each has at least two full rooms of canonical works.

What came before Impressionism?

The Barbizon School had painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau since the 1830s, pioneering outdoor landscape work. Gustave Courbet's Realism had already shocked the Salon with unidealised modern subjects. Camille Corot's silvery landscapes influenced Pissarro and Morisot directly. Japanese woodblock prints, arriving in Paris after the 1854 opening of Japan, taught the Impressionists about cropped compositions, flattened space and asymmetric design; Degas absorbed these lessons most visibly.

The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse

The Lady of Shalott (from the poem by Tennyson) by John William Waterhouse

Portrait of Charles Deering by John Singer Sargent

Ballet at the Paris Opéra by Edgar Degas

Little Girl in a Blue Armchair by Mary Cassatt

The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne by Alfred Sisley

Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water by James McNeill Whistler

Impressionism

62 artists · 1860–1890

Impressionism^[5] began in 1860s Paris as a revolt against the official Salon system and the academic tradition that governed it. A loose circle of painters, working independently but exhibiting together across eight group shows between 1874 and 1886, abandoned the studio conventions of historical and mythological subjects in favour of direct observation: landscapes painted outdoors, city streets at dusk, cafes, railway stations, private domestic scenes. They worked quickly, using broken brushwork and high-keyed colour to capture the transient effects of natural light rather than the fixed tonal modelling taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The movement drew its name from Claude Monet [15]'s Impression, Sunrise (1872), ridiculed by the critic Louis Leroy in Le Charivari. Within two decades, that insult became a badge of honour. Impressionism shifted the purpose of painting from narrative illustration toward perceptual experience. Its influence extended well beyond France: Mary Cassatt [16] brought its methods to an American audience, while Childe Hassam adapted them to the light of New England. The movement did not produce a manifesto or a unified theory. What held it together was a shared conviction that painting should record how the eye actually sees, not how the academy said it should.

Key Ideas

Painting Light as Subject

Before Impressionism, light was a tool used to illuminate a scene's narrative content. The Impressionists reversed this hierarchy: light itself became the subject. Monet's series paintings of Rouen Cathedral and haystacks show the same motif recorded under dozens of different atmospheric conditions, proving that the character of a scene changes entirely depending on the hour and the weather. Pissarro and Sisley pursued the same logic across rural and suburban landscapes. This was not decorative variation. It represented a fundamental claim that visual perception is unstable, that the world looks different from one moment to the next, and that a painting honest about this instability is more truthful than one that smooths it away.
Modern Life as Worthy Subject Matter

Academic painting in mid-nineteenth-century France ranked subjects in a strict hierarchy: history and mythology at the top, still life at the bottom. Scenes of everyday bourgeois leisure had no place. The Impressionists dismantled this system. Renoir painted crowds dancing at open-air cafes in Montmartre. Degas observed ballet rehearsals, laundresses, and racehorses. Morisot and Cassatt recorded the private domestic world of women and children with psychological directness. Manet placed contemporary Parisians in compositions borrowed from Renaissance masters, forcing viewers to confront the gap between classical idealism and modern reality. The collective result was a body of work that treated the present tense as sufficient material for serious painting.
Broken Colour and the Visible Brushstroke

Academic painting prized invisible technique: smooth surfaces, seamless tonal gradations, no evidence of the brush. The Impressionists abandoned this finish. They applied paint in short, separate strokes of relatively pure colour, allowing the viewer's eye to mix them at a distance rather than blending pigments on the palette. This technique produced a shimmering optical effect that mimicked the way light fragments across surfaces. It also made the act of painting visible. The viewer sees both the depicted scene and the physical labour of the brush on canvas. This double awareness was radical. It acknowledged that a painting is a constructed object, not a transparent window, and it laid the groundwork for the formal experiments of Post-Impressionism and beyond.
Plein Air Practice and the Rejection of the Studio

The Impressionists did not invent outdoor painting. The Barbizon School had worked in the Forest of Fontainebleau since the 1830s, and Corot painted luminous Italian landscapes decades before Monet was born. What the Impressionists did was elevate plein air work from preparatory sketch to finished painting. Portable easels, collapsible paint tubes (commercially available from the 1840s), and the expanding railway network made this practical. Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille painted side by side along the Seine in the late 1860s, developing shared methods through direct competition. The resulting canvases had an immediacy and freshness that studio reworking would have destroyed. Speed was not carelessness. It was the only way to capture conditions that changed by the minute.
Independent Exhibition as Artistic Strategy

The decision to bypass the official Salon and organise independent exhibitions was as consequential as any stylistic innovation. The Societe Anonyme Cooperative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, founded in December 1873, gave its members control over hanging, pricing, and presentation. The first exhibition opened at the photographer Nadar's former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in April 1874, featuring works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, and Cezanne among others. Eight exhibitions followed through 1886. The model proved that artists could reach collectors and critics without institutional gatekeeping. It directly inspired the Salon des Independants (1884) and anticipated the artist-run exhibition spaces of the twentieth century.

Key Artists

Claude Monet

1840–1926 · French

John Singer Sargent

1856–1925 · American

James McNeill Whistler

1834–1903 · American

Edgar Degas

1834–1917 · French

John William Waterhouse

1849–1917 · British

Mary Cassatt

1844–1926 · American

Nan Goldin

1953–present · American

Camille Pissarro

1830–1903 · French

Explore adjacent traditions and influences.

Post-Impressionism

1880–1910

Realism

1840–1880

Pointillism

1884–1910

Progression of Art

Landmark works that shaped the movement.

Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe

Edouard Manet · 1863 · Oil on canvas, 208 x 264.5 cm

Manet's large-scale canvas, rejected by the Salon jury and shown at the Salon des Refuses of 1863, functions as the opening provocation of the Impressionist era. The composition borrows openly from Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris and from the Concert Champetre then attributed to Giorgione. But Manet stripped away the mythological alibi. A nude woman sits on the grass alongside two fully clothed men in contemporary dress, staring directly at the viewer. The painting scandalised Paris not because of its nudity but because this nude was recognisably modern, placed in an ordinary picnic scene without allegorical justification. Technically, Manet flattened the traditional tonal modelling into broad contrasts of light and dark. The figures appear staged rather than naturalistically situated. What they were seeing was a deliberate break with illusionistic convention. The painting now hangs at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

Impression, Sunrise

Claude Monet · 1872 · Oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm

Painted in a single sitting from a hotel room overlooking the port of Le Havre in November 1872, this small canvas inadvertently named an entire movement. When it appeared at the first group exhibition in April 1874, the critic Louis Leroy seized on the title for a satirical review in Le Charivari. The painting shows the industrial harbour at dawn: cranes, masts, and smokestacks dissolve into blue-grey mist while a bright orange sun casts a broken reflection across the water. The brushwork is rapid and summary, with individual strokes of colour placed side by side rather than blended. Monet was not attempting to describe the port's physical reality. He was recording a momentary visual sensation, the specific quality of light at a particular hour on a particular morning. The painting hangs at the Musee Marmottan Monet in Paris.

The Cradle

Berthe Morisot · 1872 · Oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm

Shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, The Cradle was among the earliest works by a woman painter to appear in the group's shows. Morisot's sister Edma watches over her sleeping infant daughter Blanche. The composition is built on a diagonal that links the mother's downward gaze through her bent arm to the child's closed eyes, reinforced by the transparent gauze curtain that Edma draws across the cradle. Morisot's brushwork is deliberately loose. The curtain is rendered with thin, translucent strokes that let the ground show through. The subject itself was a statement. Morisot presented motherhood as observed fact, psychologically specific and free of narrative embellishment. The painting now hangs at the Musee d'Orsay.

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas · 1874 · Oil on canvas, 83.5 x 77.2 cm

Degas occupies an awkward position within Impressionism. He rejected plein air painting, preferred drawing to colour, and composed his canvases with the calculated asymmetry of a photographer. The Dance Class shows the ballet master Jules Perrot conducting an examination while roughly two dozen dancers and their mothers wait in various states of attention and boredom. The composition is deliberately off-centre. Empty floor dominates the lower portion of the canvas. This arrangement mirrors the cropped viewpoints found in Japanese woodblock prints, which Degas collected avidly. The palette is restrained: muted greens, warm browns, touches of orange and white in the tutus. The painting entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Bal du moulin de la Galette

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1876 · Oil on canvas, 131 x 175 cm

Renoir's largest and most ambitious figure composition depicts a Sunday afternoon dance at an open-air cafe in Montmartre. Couples dance in dappled sunlight filtered through acacia trees while others sit at tables in the foreground. Renoir captured the way sunlight breaks through leaves and falls in irregular patches across faces and clothing, mixing with the bluer tones of shadow. The brushwork is fluid and varied: tight enough in the foreground figures to describe individual expressions, looser in the dancing couples further back. This graduated focus replicates how the eye actually processes a crowded scene. The painting is now one of the centrepieces of the Musee d'Orsay.

La Gare Saint-Lazare

Claude Monet · 1877 · Oil on canvas, 75 x 104 cm

In early 1877 Monet obtained permission to set up his easel inside the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris's busiest railway terminus. He produced twelve canvases of the station. This version looks into the train shed from beneath its iron-and-glass roof. Locomotives idle at the platforms, releasing clouds of steam that catch the light pouring through the glass above. The steam is the real subject. Monet painted it in blues, mauves, and pale yellows, treating it with the same attention he gave to clouds and water elsewhere. The painting made an explicit claim: modern industrial infrastructure was as valid a subject for landscape painting as a Norman cliff. The canvas is now at the Musee d'Orsay.

Boat in the Flood at Port-Marly

Alfred Sisley · 1876 · Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 61 cm

When the Seine burst its banks in 1876 and flooded Port-Marly, Sisley produced six paintings of the event. This canvas shows a small boat navigating floodwater that has risen to first-floor windows. Sisley was the most consistent landscape painter in the Impressionist circle. His strength was atmospheric precision. The grey-blue sky and its reflection in the standing water create a compressed, almost monochromatic colour field. Against this cool envelope, the warm pinks and ochres of the building stand out sharply. Sisley resisted the temptation to dramatise the disaster. The painting records a specific atmospheric moment with the same detached attention the group brought to sunlit gardens. Now at the Musee d'Orsay.

Rouen Cathedral, West Facade, Sunlight

Claude Monet · 1894 · Oil on canvas, 100 x 66 cm

Between 1892 and 1894, Monet painted more than thirty views of the west facade of Rouen Cathedral. He worked on multiple canvases simultaneously, switching between them as the light changed. The surfaces are heavily encrusted with paint that echoes the masonry of the facade itself. In this sunlit version, the stone dissolves into golds, oranges, and warm whites, with blue-violet shadows pooling in the Gothic portals. The series was Monet's most rigorous demonstration that objects have no fixed colour. When twenty paintings from the series were exhibited at Durand-Ruel's gallery in 1895, Pissarro wrote to his son Lucien that the Cathedrals were extraordinary. Five paintings from the series are at the Musee d'Orsay.

The Child's Bath

Mary Cassatt · 1893 · Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 66.1 cm

Cassatt was the only American artist to exhibit regularly with the Impressionists, invited by Degas after he saw her work at the 1874 Salon. By the early 1890s she had absorbed Japanese ukiyo-e prints and the intimacy of Morisot. The Child's Bath synthesises both. A woman washes a young girl's feet in a basin. The viewpoint is elevated, compressing the space in a manner borrowed from Japanese printmaking. The colour is organised in broad, flat areas. Yet the handling remains Impressionist in its visible brushwork and sensitivity to light. The painting has been at the Art Institute of Chicago since 1910.

Origins

The Salon System and Its Discontents

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Paris Salon controlled access to the French art market. Juries drawn from the Academie des Beaux-Arts decided which paintings were accepted and where they were hung. Favourable placement on the line could launch a career; rejection could end one. The system rewarded large historical compositions and classical subject matter. In 1863, the Salon jury rejected so many submissions that Napoleon III ordered a parallel exhibition, the Salon des Refuses. Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe became the most discussed painting there, attracting crowds who came largely to laugh. The episode exposed the Salon's authority as arbitrary rather than absolute.

The Gleyre Studio and Early Alliances

In the early 1860s, four young painters met in the teaching studio of Charles Gleyre: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille. They shared an interest in landscape and contemporary subjects. By 1864 they were painting together outdoors along the Seine, developing techniques in direct dialogue. Bazille, who came from a wealthy Montpellier family, provided financial support and shared studio space. His death in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 removed one of the group's most talented members before the first exhibition. Meanwhile, Pissarro and Cezanne formed their own working relationship at Pontoise. Berthe Morisot, trained by Corot, entered Manet's circle in the late 1860s.

The Franco-Prussian War and Its Aftermath

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 scattered the emerging group. Monet and Pissarro fled to London, where they studied Turner and Constable at the National Gallery and met the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. Bazille was killed at the Battle of Beaune-la-Rolande in November 1870. Renoir was conscripted. When they reconvened, the political and cultural atmosphere had changed. The Third Republic brought new freedoms but also economic uncertainty. Durand-Ruel began buying Impressionist work in quantity, providing income that the Salon system had denied them.

The Eight Exhibitions, 1874 to 1886

The first group exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 in the former studio of the photographer Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines. Thirty artists showed 165 works. Leroy's satirical review in Le Charivari gave the group its name. Subsequent exhibitions followed through 1886, though the roster changed constantly. Degas insisted on including Mary Cassatt and resisted the label Impressionist. Pissarro was the only artist who showed at all eight exhibitions. By the final show in 1886, Seurat exhibited A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, announcing Neo-Impressionism. The group exhibitions were over, but the infrastructure they had built would sustain the next generation.

In Their Words

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”

Claude Monet, Attributed in multiple sources; cited by the Denver Art Museum

“As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me. He was a man to be consulted, rather like God.”

Paul Cezanne, Letter to Ambroise Vollard; cited by the Musee d'Orsay

“Impression: I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it.”

Louis Leroy, Le Charivari, 25 April 1874

All Impressionism Artists

56 artists.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Impressionism?
Impressionism^[5] was a French art movement of the 1860s to 1880s that broke with the academic tradition by prioritising the direct observation of light and atmosphere over narrative content. Its painters worked quickly, often outdoors, using visible brushstrokes and pure colour to record the shifting appearance of everyday scenes rather than smoothing them into finished studio compositions.
When did Impressionism start?
The movement crystallised in December 1873 when Claude Monet^[15], Pierre-Auguste Renoir^[11], Edgar Degas^[17], Camille Pissarro^[12], Berthe Morisot^[13] and others founded the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres to bypass the official Salon. Their first independent exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 at the photographer Nadar's former studio on the Boulevard des Capucines, giving the movement its public debut.
Who are the most famous Impressionist painters?
The core Impressionist circle was Claude Monet^[15], Pierre-Auguste Renoir^[11], Edgar Degas^[17], Camille Pissarro^[12], Berthe Morisot^[13], Alfred Sisley^[14] and Mary Cassatt^[16], with Édouard Manet as a precursor and mentor figure. Eight group exhibitions followed between 1874 and 1886, after which the members dispersed into distinct directions: Monet pursued his series paintings of Rouen Cathedral and haystacks, Degas focused on figures, and Renoir turned towards a more classical manner.
What defines the Impressionist style?
Four technical features distinguish Impressionism^[5]: broken colour applied in short separate strokes rather than blended on the palette, visible brushwork that acknowledges the painting as a constructed object, plein air practice using portable easels and tube paints, and an interest in fugitive effects of light, weather and time of day. Monet's series of the same motif under different conditions made this the movement's defining ambition.
Why was Impressionism controversial at the time?
The Paris art establishment considered finished paintings to have smooth invisible surfaces, elevated historical or mythological subjects, and idealised figures. Impressionist canvases broke every rule: brushstrokes remained visible, subjects were ordinary bourgeois life, and compositions looked unfinished. The critic Louis Leroy coined the movement's name in an 1874 review mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and the term stuck despite its intended insult.
What is the difference between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism?
Impressionism^[5] (1870s and 1880s) recorded the visible world's surface appearance under changing light. Post-Impressionism (roughly 1886 to 1905) started from that foundation but pushed in symbolic, structural and emotional directions that the original group had avoided. Cézanne sought underlying geometry, Van Gogh used colour for emotional effect, Gauguin pursued spiritual simplification, and Seurat developed pointillism: four different rebellions against the parent movement.
Where can I see the best Impressionist paintings?
The largest concentrations are in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée de l'Orangerie (including Monet's Water Lilies rooms), the Art Institute of Chicago (home to Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day and a deep Monet and Renoir holding), the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Courtauld Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Each has at least two full rooms of canonical works.
What came before Impressionism?
The Barbizon School had painted in the Forest of Fontainebleau since the 1830s, pioneering outdoor landscape work. Gustave Courbet's Realism^[5] had already shocked the Salon with unidealised modern subjects. Camille Corot's silvery landscapes influenced Pissarro and Morisot directly. Japanese woodblock prints, arriving in Paris after the 1854 opening of Japan, taught the Impressionists about cropped compositions, flattened space and asymmetric design; Degas absorbed these lessons most visibly.

Sources

Impressionism editorial draws on the following published scholarship.

[1] book Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society, 1988 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[2] book John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 1946 Used for: biography, influences, stylistic analysis.
[3] book Norma Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading, 1991 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis.
[4] book Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity, 2000 Used for: biography, stylistic analysis, technique.
[5] wikipedia Wikipedia: Impressionism Used for: biography.
[6] book Nia Gould, A History of Art in 21 Cats Used for: biography.
[7] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell Used for: biography.
[8] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell_1 Used for: biography.
[9] book Carol Strickland and John Boswell, The Annotated Mona Lisa _ba crash course in art history from prehistoric to post-modern _cCarol Strickland and John Boswell_2 Used for: biography.
[10] wikipedia Wikipedia: James McNeill Whistler Used for: biography.
[11] wikipedia Wikipedia: Pierre-Auguste Renoir Used for: biography.
[12] wikipedia Wikipedia: Camille Pissarro Used for: biography.
[13] wikipedia Wikipedia: Berthe Morisot Used for: biography.
[14] wikipedia Wikipedia: Alfred Sisley Used for: biography.
[15] wikipedia Wikipedia: Claude Monet Used for: biography.
[16] wikipedia Wikipedia: Mary Cassatt Used for: biography.
[17] wikipedia Wikipedia: Edgar Degas Used for: biography.

Editorial overseen by Solis Prints. Sources verified 2026-05-30. Click a source for details, or hover over [N] in the page above to preview.

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Impressionism

Key Ideas

Painting Light as Subject

Modern Life as Worthy Subject Matter

Broken Colour and the Visible Brushstroke

Plein Air Practice and the Rejection of the Studio

Independent Exhibition as Artistic Strategy