French Impressionism

Books Impressionism

Many art books have been published on Impressionism, especially biographies on the big names of the first hour: Degas, Monet and Renoir. Their sketchily accessible work still resonates worldwide with that of other souls. Alexanders Artbooks Shop naturally carries books by the Impressionists from renowned art book publishers such as Anness Publishing, Flammarion, Phaidon, Prestel, Taschen and Thames and Hudson. You'll find them on this page and the next in no particular order. Enjoy!

Claude Monet (Parijs 1840 - Giverny 1926), Impression, soleil levant, 1872,
oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Impressionism developed in France in the 1960s. It is mostly considered the beginning of modern painting. Classical music and literature were also influenced by Impressionism. In 1874, 11 years after the first Salon des Refusés, Impressionism made its first clear appearance. Over 30 young French painters exhibited 165 works together in a studio in Paris. They did so at a strategic moment, exactly a month before the official annual Salon was due to open. Participants in the exhibition included Eugène Boudin, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.

Visitors to the first exhibition were deeply shocked by their impressionist paintings, so highly regarded today. Because of Claude Monet's painting Impression, soleil levant (1872, see image above), journalist and art critic Louis Leroy expressed his vehement indignation in the Parisian magazine Le Charivari of 25 April 1874. He derogatorily called the exhibitors ‘les impressionistes.’ By then, the innovative movement of young artists had been going on for a decade. The French realist painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883) had caught their eye because of the disapproval of his work by the official salon juries. His now worldfamous paintings Olympia and Déjeuner sur l'herbe, in which he experimented with style and the rules of academic painting, had prompted the first alternative salon exhibition in Paris: The Salon des Refusés ['The Exhibition of the Refused'] of 1863.

Impressionism - Dawn of Modern Art

by Art Historian Sander Kletter

Innovativeness inspired by Manet

Representation of the moment, light, weather conditions and atmosphere

Impressionism was a revolutionary art movement. Among other things, it turned against painting in the studio. Contrary to centuries of tradition, impressionists preferred to paint outdoors. The Barbizon School can be considered a precursor of Impressionism in this context. Moreover, the Impressionists did not paint history pieces full of nationalistic propaganda or paintings with a religious or mythological theme. Their subjects did not depict a moral problem. They communicated no underlying message. Instead, the Impressionists chose inspiration from ordinary uncomplicated everyday life. They painted ordinary citizens on a terrace. They recorded trips to the seaside and the beach. They painted visitors to cafés, strollers on the boulevards of Paris, game drives of the bourgeoisie and rehearsing ballet girls.

Of course, nature impressions should not be missing from the mentioned list of subjects. Impressionists painted landscapes, village and townscapes that focused on the atmosphere resulting from the season, sunlight and air conditions. Landscape painters wanted to depict the right light and atmosphere of a moment in time. They tried to capture what something looked like at a specific time of day in a specific season. A painting therefore had to be done quickly, because otherwise the image was in danger of changing due to changes in the position of the sun. Impressionists, because of their keen interest in light and the peculiarities of light fall, also called themselves ‘illuminists.’ They used the term in the period 1860-1874, before the swear word impressionists was coined. From 1874, however, the badinating term impressionists was triumphantly used by themselves as a nickname.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (Limoges, 1841 - Cagnes-sur-Mer, 1919), Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas, 131 x 175 cm, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Impressionism was an innovative movement not only in terms of content but also stylistically.When the Impressionists appeared on the scene of the art world, the frequently applied style of Neoclassicism was still considered the officially recognised painting style. Consequently, this style was highly valued by conservative-minded salon judges like William-Adolphe Bouguereau. He was a staunch opponent of Impressionism, which completely deviated from the academic style he promoted.

Because the Impressionists worked in nature, not in a studio with cold neutral light from the North, the colours in their paintings were noticeably lighter, shadows more colourful, depicted faces blotchy due to the changing sunlight and contours of shapes less sharp.

The Impressionists tried to make use of the very latest scientific findings in the field of colour theory.

They used practical knowledge from physics.They devised a way to put that knowledge into practice while painting. They knew that there are three primary colours: red, yellow and blue. They knew that mixing these three colours creates the three secondary colours: green, orange and violet. The primary and secondary colours together form exactly the range of colours of the rainbow. The primary and secondary colours are not only seen in a rainbow, but also become visible in the physics experiment where a beam of light is refracted through a prism. Since the Impressionists wanted to depict the natural light they observed as faithfully as possible, they therefore preferred to use combinations of the six rainbow colours. They placed pure colours on the canvas with smooth and loosely juxtaposed brushstrokes. Seen from some distance, the brushstrokes optically blend into new colours. The clearly visible brushstrokes in the final painting reinforce the impression, that impressionists' paintings were done quickly.

Style characteristics of Impressionism

Alfred Sisley (Paris 1839 – Moret-sur-Loing 1899), The Seine at Bougival, 1876,
oil on canvas, 45 x 61 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The main impressionists

Impressionism reached its peak between 1874 and 1876. The Impressionists continue to exhibit actively together until 1886. The main painters that were active in the French impressionist movement are: Eugène Boudin, Mary Cassatt, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Emile Claus, Edgar Degas, Armand Guillaumin, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Édouard Manet, Willard Metcalf, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Lilla Cabot Perry, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Julia dos Santos Baptist, John Singer Sargent, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Alfred Sisley, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Utrillo. French Impressionist sculptors are Camille Claudel, Aristide Maillol and Auguste Rodin.

Impressionism flourished als out of France. Important German impressionists include Lovis Corinth, Max Liebermann and Max Slevogt. The american James Abbott McNeil Whistler also worked in Impressionist style for a period of his career. In the Netherlands, there was the so called Amsterdam Impressionism by artists such as George Hendrik Breitner and Isaac Israëls.

While some impressionists remained true to the subjects and stylistic characteristics of impressionism until their deaths, others developed there work in another stylistic direction or moved on to another style, such as pointillism. Remarkably, Monet, in his studio in Giverny at the end of his career and life, almost arrived at a form of abstract expressionism, although his world-famous canvases of that period were of course based on the visual reality of his garden and pond with lilies.

Edgar Degas (Paris 1834 - Paris 1917), Chanteuse de Café, 1878,
mixed media on cardboard, 53 × 41 cm, Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Camille Pissarro (Charlotte Amalie 1830 - Paris 1903), The Avenue de L'Opera, Paris, Sunlight, Winter Morning, 1898, oil on canvas, 91 x 73 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims