Art + Paris Impressionist Rise of the Impressionists

What Is Impressionism?

by Cindy Kang

On Thursday evenings, as the gas lamps were lit in Paris of the early 1870s, the smoky, dark-paneled Café Guerbois became the center of boisterous artistic debate. Over cigarettes, strong coffee and weak beer, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro and other friends from different art studios discussed the possibility of forming their own exhibiting corporation. They had had enough of the conservative taste and nepotism of the French art academy, which had rejected their paintings from the annual exhibition in Paris known as the Salon.

When their first exhibition opened in 1874, the group was called the Corporation of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. Of the unmemorable name, Renoir explained: I was afraid that … critics would immediately begin talking about a ‘new school.’ Despite the artists’ attempt to assert their individuality, the critics did indeed perceive a new movement, which they dubbed, derisively, Impressionism.

The bête noir and namesake of the exhibition was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. A morass of thick, choppy brushstrokes of unblended blues, violets and shocking orange, Monet’s work was the opposite of academic paintings such as William Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr—the darling of the 1873 Salon. The latter’s glossy, highly-finished surface, titillating mythological subject and seamlessly layered and blended tones made Monet’s painting look like an insignificant, blurry sketch done in bright, vulgar colors.

The eight Impressionist exhibitions mounted between 1874 and 1886 showcased these artists’ radical technique and subject matter. Although each artist worked in an individual style, their shared engagement with modern developments in science, urbanization and new cultural influences led to a revolution in Western painting.

The Roots of Impressionism

Optical Theory

Drawing from new theories of optics derived from Hermann von Helmholtz, the Impressionists believed that the human eye encountered a scene as a field of pure colors. The brain then processed these colors to create an intelligible image. An Impressionist painting was therefore an attempt to recapture that primary sensation.

Thus, Monet instructed a student: When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you … Merely think here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you … until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you.

Paint in a Tube

Renoir once claimed, Without colors in tubes, there would be … no Impressionism. Before the mid-19th century, artists either made their own paints for each work day or stored them in messy, smelly pig bladders. The invention of paint in metal tubes was a revelation for the Impressionists. They could now bring their easels outdoors and work on whole paintings for entire afternoons, instead of being tied to a studio to work on one section of a painting at a time. Tube paints allowed the Impressionists to seize their direct, fleeting sensations of light and atmosphere and completely dissolve form into touches of pure brilliant color.

Photography

The Impressionists reacted competitively to the development of photography in France in the middle of the 19th century. Photography’s limited palette pushed them to emphasize color as a distinguishing feature of painting. Their sketch-like technique, which looked spontaneous and dashed-off, even though it was meticulous and deliberate, attempted to compete with the immediacy of a photograph.

Nevertheless, the Impressionists also borrowed some of photography’s tricks. In Degas’s Place de la Concorde, the arbitrarily cropped man at the left and the blurry figures and horse in the background were all devices imported from photography to convey a sense of motion and the impression of a moment frozen in time.

Japonisme

The formal innovations of the Impressionists were as much indebted to Japanese woodblock prints as to photography. The craze for Japanese art, dubbed japonisme, was launched by the exhibition of the Japanese pavilion at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition. Japan had been closed to the West for the past two centuries and the influx of art from the East astounded the avant-garde artists. Degas was one of the earliest collectors of Japanese prints and Pissarro called the Japanese printmaker Hiroshige a marvelous Impressionist. The asymmetrical compositions, strong outlines, areas of flat color and aerial perspective found in works by Degas and Mary Cassatt were inspired by Japanese design principles.

Paris, City of Light

Wide, sparkling boulevards, lazy boats on the Seine, seedy cafés under lamplight—these everyday scenes painted by the Impressionists actually reveal the total transformation Paris experienced in the 19th century. Before Paris became the City of Light, it was a haphazard accumulation of old neighborhoods with narrow, meandering, sewage-filled streets. Emperor Napoleon III appointed the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to raze the city and build orderly grands boulevards, allowing light and air to circulate. The facelift included radiant glass-and-iron train stations to service a rising middle class. This petite bourgeoisie demanded new forms of leisure—day trips to the countryside, raunchy entertainment at café-concerts—all of which the Impressionists captured in their quest to express modern life through painting.

Haussmann’s Renovation of Paris

In June of 1852, Napoléon III commissioned the Renovation of Paris, a visionary program to modernize and reshape the city of Paris. Led by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, an able city administrator whose title was Prefect of the Seine, it had a far-reaching effect on not only how Parisians lived but on their aesthetic experience of Paris as well. Haussmann’s plan cut through narrow medieval streets and alleyways and created grand avenues and boulevards, displacing many of Paris’s poor. But the plan didn’t stop at updating the streets; it refashioned the look of the city as well. The elegant new buildings that were constructed to line the boulevards were rigorously planned to be the same height, with identical grey roofs, cut stone façades and balconies that aligned on the second and fifth floors. As a result, the streets had a unified aesthetic and each block seemed like one seamless palace.

The extensive urban planning project, with its primary goals of bringing safer and more sanitary living conditions to Paris, introduced clean water, modern sewers, and gas streetlights to Paris life, as well as train stations, schools, hospitals, city buildings, public monuments and a central market at Les Halles. Because urban Paris was a favorite subject of many of the Impressionists, Haussmann’s innovations can be seen in such paintings as Renoir’s The Grand Boulevards, Monet’s paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare, and Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day and Boulevard Haussmann, Snow.

Impressionists

Édouard Manet (1832—1883)

Claude Monet (1840—1926)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841—1919)

Paul Cézanne (1839—1906)

Edgar Degas (1834—1917)

Berthe Morisot (1841—1895)

Gustave Caillebotte (1848—1894)

Vincent van Gogh (1853—1890)

The Impressionist revolution was led by a core group of artists. Friends and colleagues, they developed their theories over cheap wine in Parisian cafés and in trips to the countryside. They painted together and suffered together, they fought authority and fought amongst themselves; these are the artists who set the stage for modern art.

Édouard Manet

If I’m lucky, when I paint, first my patrons leave the room, then my dealers, and if I’m really lucky I leave too.

—Édouard Manet

TIMELINE

January 23, 1832

Édouard Manet born to Eugénie-Désirée

Fournier and Auguste Manet in Paris.

1848 Travels to Rio Janeiro on the trainee ship, Le Havre et Gaudeloupe.

1849 Begins taking piano lessons from Suzanne Leenhoff.

1850 Enters studio of Thomas Couture.

1852 Son, Léon-Édouard, is born as the result of an affair with Leenhoff.

1856 Leaves Couture to open studio with Albert de Balleroy.

1859 L’Absinthe is rejected by the Paris Salon.

1861 The Spanish Singer receives an honorable mention at the Salon.

1863 Marries Leenhoff; exhibits Déjeuner sur l’herbe at the Salon des Refusés.

1865 Exhibits Olympia at the Paris Salon. Travels to Spain to escape the critical reaction.

1866 Meets Claude Monet at the opening of the Salon.

1868 Paints portrait of Émile Zola in thanks for the writer’s support.

1874 Vacations across the Seine from Monet, visiting often to paint.

1881 Receives the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.

1882 Completes Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

April 30, 1882

Manet dies and is buried at the Passy cemetery.

by Michael B. Dougherty

Édouard Manet never wanted to be seen as a radical figure in the world of painting, but his contribution to art history is nothing less than revolutionary. As the reluctant father of the Impressionist movement, his approach to technique and subject matter made their epoch, and Modernism itself, possible.

The son of a bourgeois mother who moved in royal circles (her godfather was the Crown Prince of Sweden) and a wealthy bureaucrat father, Manet enjoyed a