The French Impressionists

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colours, freely brushed, primacy over line. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the modern world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details. They used short, "broken" brush strokes of pure and unmixed colour, not smoothly blended, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense colour vibration.

Monet ( water lilies/gardens, haystacks, landscapes/waterscapes)
Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Poppies Blooming 1873
Frost on Haystacks, 1888-1889
Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies 1899



















Renoir (women, children, social scenes)
Dance at le Moulin de la Galette, 1876
Girls at the Piano, 1892



















Degas (ballerinas/dancers)
The star, 1878



















Cezanne (still lifes, mountains/landscapes, vivid color)
Mont Sainte-Victoire 1885-1887
Still Life, Drapery, Pitcher, and Fruit Bowl, 1893-1894