1

Impressio
8 n
, sunrise
7 C.
MONET
4

Bazill Caillebott Cézann Dega Gaugui Guillaumi Mane Mone Pissarr Renoi Sisle Van
e e e s n n t t o r y Gogh
 
French version Museums Exhibitions
Biographies(click name of painter )

IMPRESSIONISM, MODERNITY and TRADITION

Neo- Impressionism

Impressionist painting remains the most attractive period in the history of modern art and the
most appreciated by the public . Series of exhibitions, an abundant literature and record
sales give evidence of today's extraordinary resonance of works of the Impressionist painters,
of which a number are engraved on our artistic conscience .

At their time, Impressionist works appeared to be so outrageously modern, that it took their
contemporaries more than thirty years to finally admit them - if not to like them -.

However, as the years go by, Impressionism,

seems to us nowadays, much more to maintain
close links with tradition, and to constitute the
esthetic achievement of an artistic creation
related to realistic representation.

This link, a long time considered as the most

normal thing in the world, to which
impressionism had given a new definition based
on "impression", will thereafter lose its
compulsory character with the evolution of fine
    arts in XXth century.

Isn't the durable success of Impressionism due to

the fact that we are sensitive to its modernity
and to its traditionalism?

Of course, Impressionism cannot be reduced to

By the sea
Auguste RENOIR, 1883
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
this unique aspect, it is also a bias to paint
cheerful reality, that of leisures and beauty of
nature, an endless search for natural light... in a
word, a certain art of living which fits in with
many aspirations of our society.
This site in homage to the Impressionist painters attempts to present the history of the
Impressionist Movement as well as the routes of each great painter whose name is
indissociable of Impressionism.

Musics : DEBUSSY - Reverie (1890)

Impressionist Map HISTORY OF THE IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT

PREDECESSORS

Between 1820 and 1850, prestigious artistic movements would come up in French Painting.
First the romantic revolution ( Géricault , Delacroix ), then the realistic movement ( Courbet
, Millet ) where naturalist painters of "The Barbizon School" ( Daubigny , Rousseau ,
Troyon , Corot ) played a great role.

Under the influence of british landscape painters such as Bonington, Constable, Turner,
landscape painting would become a fully recognized genre in French Painting, of which
Corot will be the most famous representative.

Courbet , Corot and Delacroix, then represent the avant-garde of French Painting, and will
constitute the models which all the Impressionists will take as a starting point at their
beginnings.

Biography of Joseph Mallord William TURNER

The ERA : SECOND EMPIRE and ACADEMIC ART

The future Impressionists will grow in a country governed by authoritarian Napoleon III,
whose cultural policy entirely centered on the greatness of the Empire was hostile to them.

  The advent of the Second Empire (1852-70) was to mark a rupture in the artistic history
of the XIXth century in France, between official art on one side, and independent art on
the other side.

The cultural policy of Napoleon encenses an insipid academic art (the so called
"pompier" style) best represented by Meissonnier, Cabanel and Bouguereau, covered with
honors by the political power and ruling over the Academy of Fine Arts, and disparages a
realistic art, often very pauper, illustrated by Courbet, Millet, Daubigny, Rousseau...

 
This rupture will appear on multiple  
 levels:

- political : most realistic or naturalist

painters are republican and disagree
with the Coup d'etat of Napoleon III.

- esthetic : they hate the great historical

or mythological "machines" of the
academic painters, and wish to express
the simple beauties of nature, the life of
their humblest contemporaries.

- sociological : the new painters come Calvary on The Côte de Grâce,

from the working classes and are not Honfleur
related any more to aristocracy Camille COROT, 1829-30
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
- geographical : they are in search of
sites protected from industrialization
(Barbizon, Normandy)

This policy will not prevent the belated fame of Corot (1796-1875) from growing up. Corot,
whose work comes to an end when Impressionist painters appear on the scene, is already a
modern painter and can be seen as a precursor of Impressionists .

He excels in "plein-air"(outdoor) landscape painting, and his portraits are every bit as good
as his landscapes for they release so much expressiveness. The Impressionists and many great
painters after them will make of Corot a source of inspiration, and will dedicate him an
immense admiration. Moreover they will try without success to obtain his participation in
their 1st group exhibition in 1874.

see Jean-Baptiste Camille COROT

A NEW CONTEMPORARY REALISTIC PAINTING

A new style of painting, that will take the name of Impressionism in the year 1874, will
develop in France between 1860 and 1890. This evolution in painting history is not an
isolated movement, for independent pictorial art will evolve everywhere in Europe in the
second half of the XIXth century towards a much more modern painting that better
correspond to industrial progress acceleration , and changes in the way of life .

Painters which will be named, depending on time and context, "Independents",

"Intransigents" or "Batignolles Group ", at last "Impressionnists", will be engaged in a
struggle, begun with Manet in 1860, against an old and dusty workshop painting art with
established conventions that had become too restrictive for modern time, in order to have
their new realistic way of painting recognized.

This new painting will be the result of a series of reflexions and intentions which preceded it,
that of Barbizon School's painters, and that of neo-impressionist painters of the Meetings of
Saint-Siméon in Honfleur ( Boudin, Jongkind, Dubourg... ) that Monet attended as a young
painter.

The new realism of the Impressionists definitively rejects the classical research of an ideal
of beauty and an eternal essence of things, and postulates instead as preponderant the real
vision compared to any learned conventional theory. The work that results from this vision
is claimed to be relative : relative to the conditions under which the same scene can be
observed (lights, skies, colors...), and relative to the painter himself.

Manet's formula : "I paint what I see, and

not what others like to see", summarizes
this claim of the artist to give his personal
vision , that of his own subjectivity.

Their great concern about giving

    representations translating the artist's real
vision with its immediate nuances, will
lead them to undertake multiple pictorial
researches and to forsake a number of
rules which then passed for immutable
Beach at Sainte-Adresse
in painting : precise drawing and
Claude MONET, 1867
contours, use of flat colors with
Art Institute of Chicago
attenuated variations, light and shade
convention...

By doing so, the future Impressionists will introduce a number of new pictorial processes :
use of light tones, division of tones (an orange is represented by juxtaposition of two pure
colors, red and yellow), form and volume resulting from colored brushworks instead of
drawing-contour, thickness of paint ...

The Impressionist movement is thus well at the origin of a great artistic revolution , today
still the object of studies and analysis, which will be put at the service of a new conception
about the role and place of painting in society.

Forsaking historical or mythological subjects,    

 Impressionist painters will deeply renew
painting themes to better picture their
contemporary world .

They seek their subjects in the eternal world of

nature as well as in their daily world , each
painter developing his own set of themes. For
them, a subject is worth another , which counts
being more their vision and their pictorial
search to paint it.

  The Impressionist step aiming at representing a

surrounding reality which is relevant only at
one moment and under given conditions , the
execution of a painting is fast , close to the
draft. It acts of a one moment painting, of a
fugitive impression.
A woman ironing
Last point, the act to paint is asserted as a Edgar DEGAS, 1869
personal pleasure , as well as an autonomous Neue Pinakothek
spiritual value . In this conception of art for Munich, Germany
art , the artist is free of his personal creation.

If Impressionist masters are now at the firmament of painting, it is important to recall to

which extent their painting was misunderstood and rejected at their time . Let us quote their
contemporary Theodore Duret (Art critic 1838-1927) in his " History of the Impressionist
painters " : "It should be said, in homage to these men, that contempt, opprobrium, poverty,
never led them to deviate at any time of their way. They held on with their so detested way of
painting, without considering, even for one moment, to modify it in any way in order to be
accepted of the public. They waited, during many years, all the time necessary for the public
to come to them and that a change of opinion occurred, supported by their confidence in the
principles and the value of their art . "

Over twenty-five years, from 1860 to 1886, in the century where photography was invented,
Impressionist painting was going to leave strictly figurative representation, to invent a new
style of artistic representation which was going to mark the beginning of nonfigurative
modern painting . One knows today how far that was going to lead.

One can consider that in 1886 , year of their last group show in Paris and of the first
exhibition of their works in the United States , successfully organized by art dealer Durand-
Ruel , the Impressionists had achieved their goal and were at last recognized. Impressionism
will then quickly find a broad echo in Europe and North America.

MANET REREADS CLASSICS

  Manet opened the way to Impressionism while rebelling, using the exact means of
 traditional pictorial representation that he had so thoroughly learned , against academic
conventions that had become so rigid that they prohibited painting contemporary subjects.
Thus, after other works like " The
absinthe drinker " - 1858, his "
Luncheon on the grass " (1863) or his "
Olympia " (1863) are classically written
subjects reactualized with genius in
contemporary world, with so realistic
transpositions - in particular the nudes -
that they would cause scandal and be
violently attacked by critics of that time.
 
But, even if with " The music at the
Tuileries " - 1862 , Manet already
prefigures Impressionist painting - of
which he will be subject to influence in
return -, he never truly belonged to the
Impressionist movement, and appears on Luncheon on the grass
the other hand as the one who did allow Edouard MANET, 1863
its birth. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Indeed, because of the scandals he caused, and due to his immense talent as a painter, Manet
quickly gained notoriety , and from 1864 will become the leader of a quarrel opposing the
old ones and the modern ones. For the future Impressionists, he will become, after Corot and
Courbet, an example of a new manner of painting, and a new guide, around whom they will
naturally gather and, through whom, for some of them, they will meet.

From 1865, famous writer Emile Zola, a school fellow of Cézanne in Aix, will defend
Manet's cause and his new painting in "The Event", and become the supporter and historian
of the arising movement . Painting started an all-out revolution concerning not only painting
themes, but also soon its pictorial means .

ART MARKET BEGINNINGS

     
 While economic development changes
society, painting is subject to a great liberal
evolution, in the sense that it will no longer
be, as in the past, the fact of "court painters "
  working at the service of some princes or
temporal powers which order works to them,
but more and more the fact of independent
artists selling their paintings to buyers .

Art will go from now on, as well as any other

La Grenouillère
Auguste RENOIR, 1869
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
product, into a market logic. In order to find a
public and purchasers, it was a necessity for
the artist to be able to exhibit his works, which
became the first and existential concern for
this new generation of artists.

THE STATE-RUN "PARIS SALON" ART SHOW

If some art dealers, such as "Le Père Martin" , Durand-Ruel and later Petit start playing an
active role in art market, their shops or the exhibitions which they organize give quite modest
possibilities for the artists to get known compared to the large national window which
constitutes the " Official Salon " of Paris. It is there that successes and prices of art works are
decided.

In 1863 , the Salon becomes annual and a jury made up of members of the Academy of Fine
Arts and preceeding medal-holders of the Salon selects works to be exhibited. For the only
year 1863, 4000 works were refused out of 5000 paintings presented by some 3000 artists,
which led to the creation of the " Salon des Refusés", inaugurated by Napoleon III in 1863.

Surprisingly, most future Impressionists quickly obtained their first admission to the Salon,
but will thereafter frequently be refused . If Pissarro, Bazille and Degas (continuously from
1865 to 1870), were best accepted at the Salon, Cézanne, will obtain , in spite of his protests,
only one and single participation at the Salon in 1882!

If the Impressionist movement certainly is a group of painters having in common artistic

ideas and researches, it also is on a more basic level a movement of painters refused at the
Salon and trying to exhibit their works.

A NEW GENERATION OF PAINTERS

Pissarro is the senior of the Impressionists. At the Academy Suisse (a workshop which
provided models to young painters), he meets Monet in 1859, then Guillaumin and Cézanne
in 1861.
In 1862, Monet enrolled at the famous "École des Beaux-Arts" (School of Fine Arts) where
he will meet Renoir, Bazille and Sisley .

Through Manet , with whom he get acquainted as early as 1862, Degas will later meet Monet
and Renoir in 1866 at the famous Café Guerbois located in the Batignolles Street, where the
painters of the "Group of Batignolles" (as one designated the future Impressionists at that
time) used to meet.

These artists are all aged between 20 and 30 , and will weave between them multiple links.
The strongest relationships will be those of Monet with his friends, Renoir, Bazille, Sisley,
quartet which appears to be the founding members of the Impressionist group.
      After they left the Fine Arts School, during the
years between the Salon des Refusés (1863)
and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, they will
experience alternately successes and failures
at the Salon , while at the same time anxiously
searching their artistic personality. In the heart
of their concerns:

 to take on and develop the

Realism of Courbet and the
painters of Barbizon practicing
outdoor painting, with a specific
    research about light and color
effects
 to paint and develop new
  themes in art that relate to
new aspects of modern life
La grenouillère  to work out a new style of
Claude MONET, 1869 vision and a pictorial
Metropolitan Museum of Art representation allowing to
New York better account for movement
and permanent change of their
time.

By 1869 , Monet and Renoir as they were executing side by side a series of paintings in a
leisure place on the Seine River called "La Grenouillère" frequented by Parisian middle-
class people, would depict the agitation of this place with small fast brushworks, characters at
the state of draft, mobile reflections on water... thus rendering the "impression" which
emerges from this place rather than details. This word will give its name to the new
movement only five years later.

1874 - THE FIRST IMPRESSIONIST GROUP SHOW

  After the war of 1870, and the civil war "The Commune" which followed in 1871, the
 Impressionists were going to continue to work with a great enthusiasm in the direction
which they had taken. From now on, they were certain of their way of seeing , and, relieved
from the yoke of the cultural policy of the Second Empire, they expected an increased
recognition and an increase in their sales.

They were going to be terribly disappointed, and knew still more failures at the Salon than
before war.

 
The young IIIth Republic is then unstable,
and the deep shock undergone by french
society with the Commune in 1871 will
generate an intellectual climate of distrust
towards any innovation or artistic revolution.

Little by little the idea that they could just as

well do without the Salon get installed in
their mind, strengthened by art dealer
Durand-Ruel . December 27, 1873, they
 
deposited the statutes of a "Limited company
of the artist-painters, sculptors".

The first show of the Impressionists took

place in April 1874, Boulevard des
Capucines, in an apartment lent by
photographer Félix Nadar , with 31
participants , the painting by Monet entitled " Impression, sunrise
Impression, sunrise " (1872-73) giving its Claude MONET, 1873
name to the Movement. Musée Marmottan, Paris

It counted 3500 visitors , against 400 000 for the Official Salon, and was held without Manet
for whom the Salon was to remain predominant.

The IMPRESSIONIST MOVEMENT and ITS PAINTERS

 Pissarro meets Monet at the Academy
Suisse in 1859, then, in 1861, Guillaumin
and Cézanne with whom he was to work
later at Pontoise

Monet , Renoir , Sisley , Bazille met at

the Fine Arts School in 1862, while
studying in Charles Gleyre' workshop, and
constituted the core of the movement.
Bazille will be killed at Franco-Prussian
war of 1870

Degas meets Manet in 1862 (" Portrait of

Manet" - 1864 ), before meeting Monet
and Renoir in 1866 at the café Guerbois.
He will have as a follower, since 1877,
Mary Cassatt (1845-1926)

From 1868, Manet will have as pupils

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), who will
become his sister-in-law by marrying his
    brother Eugen, and Eva Gonzales (1849-
1883)

Caillebotte meets Degas, Monet and

Renoir in 1873, and helps them to
organize the 1st exhibition of the
Impressionist group in 1874, before
becoming co-organizer and co-financial of
most of the following ones. Manet and
Corot decline the invitation to take part in
Catalog of the 4th Impressionist Show this exhibition
1879
Gauguin, at his beginnings as a painter,
meets Pissarro in 1875 and becomes his
pupil, then takes part from 1879 on in the
Impressionist shows

Van Gogh will arrive in Paris in March

1886, where he will discover and integrate
Impressionism.

The Impressionists do not have truly represented a school, such as, for instance, the School of
Barbizon, installed in the forest of Fontainebleau between 1830 and 1860.

Works of great painters known as Impressionists are actually diverse and quite different
between them. If there is indeed an " Impressionist " style - of which Pissarro, Monet and
Sisley are the most typical representatives -, each painter follows his own research, his own
individual advance.

No school thus which would have codified a single style of painting, but as many singular
works which will be worked out, for a time at least, within the "Impressionist Movement" .
This Movement can be seen more like that of a "group of painters", with distinct artistic
personalities, having in common their refusal of official painting and sharing their researches
about a new manner of representing the real world. They will stick together in their fight
against exclusion of which they will be the victims, on behalf of the institutions - Academy of
Fine Arts and Jury of the Salon -, and of the majority of art critics.

This lack of recognition will lead them to organize, over a period of 12 years, from 1874 to
1886 , their own exhibitions (8 on the whole), fact which constitutes the first and outstanding
originality of the movement.

One still discusses today to know whether  

Degas, or Cézanne who appears much more
as a precursor of XXth century painting, are
true Impressionist painters... This question is
not new since Monet will write little time
before his death : "... I remain sorry to have
been the cause of the name given to a group
the majority of which did not have
anything Impressionist ".

The routes of the painters of the Impressionist

  group must thus well be considered
 
individually and remain dominating.

Moreover, the history of the Impressionist

movement was relatively short, and some of The Sainte-Victoire Mountain,
the painters who accompanied this movement seen from Bellevue
as of its beginning, such as Renoir, Cézanne, Paul CEZANNE, vers 1882-85
Degas, Guillaumin , will evolve later on in a Metropolitan Museum of Art
definitely distinct way. This is even truer for New York
Gauguin and Van Gogh, two great meteors
whose road crossed for a short moment the
Impressionist movement, .

Jean-Baptiste Camille COROT

(1796-1875)
Joseph Mallord William TURNER
(1775-1851)
Johan-Barthold JONGKIND (1819- Museums Exhibitions
1891)
  

Bazill Caillebott Cézann Dega Gaugui Guillaumi Mane Mone Pissarr Renoi Sisle Van
e e e s n n t t o r y Gogh

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