Impressionism

Claude Monet: Impressionism: Sunrise, 1872. Musee Marmottan, Paris.

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Impressionism has its name because the artists who used this progressive method painted the impressions that were received from the light which reflected from surfaces and not the objects themselves. The painting Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet also had some role in the labeling of this method of painting. This painting was on display at the first impressionist art show that included works by Monet and Berthe Morisot. An unfriendly critic, Louis Leroy, coined the name for this new art movement in his response to Mount's painting when he said "Impressionism - I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it...and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape."5

This was an important part of the development of French painting during the end of the nineteenth century and would greatly influence the methods of modern art for years to come. It was a direct reaction against the academic tradition of old artistic methods and romanticism. In other words impressionism was "progressively contemporary" which "modified the acquired past and opened the way to a still newer future"6 for art.

Pleinarisme is a word that describes the methods that the impressionists used, that is they chose to paint outdoors, outside the studio that other artists before their time had used. By going out doors, this enabled the artist to paint the world the way he/she saw it, not just the way he/she saw a studio.

5 www.artchive.com/galleries/1874/74cmt089.htm

6 Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art 19th and 20th Centuries Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, Inc.) 1978 p. 139

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