The painters who broke the
In the 1860s, a group of artists made up a new style of painting.
This year marks 150 years since the artistic style known as Impressionism was unveiled to the public, a movement that produced some of the most famous and valuable paintings in the world today. It all started in France in the 1860s, with a group of rebellious (rule-breaking) artists meeting in a café in Paris to discuss an entirely new way of painting.
What is Impressionism?
Impressionism is a painting style where the artist wants to create an impression or an idea of a scene rather than produce a completely realistic picture. The artists often worked outside instead of in a traditional studio, painting what they saw. They also used quite messy brushstrokes and tried to show natural light. The artists didn’t mind if the pictures looked as if they had been painted quickly. This was very different from the style that came before it in France.
How did it begin?
Throughout the 1860s, a group of artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro met in a Parisian café to talk about how and what they wanted to paint. These painters and their work had been rejected by the organisers of a major art exhibition known as the Salon de Paris. So, on 15 April 1874, they organised their own exhibition. It featured more than 150 paintings by 30 painters. Art critics didn’t like the work at first. Some called the show “unfinished” and even compared the works of art to wallpaper. The exhibition included a piece called Impression, Sunrise, by Monet, and an art critic called Louis Leroy made fun of it. He wrote, “What does this painting represent? Impression!” It was Monet’s painting, therefore, that inspired the new style’s official name: Impressionism.
Who were the artists?
Monet is one of the most famous Impressionist painters, and he loved to paint nature. In November last year, one of his paintings of a pond of water lilies sold for almost £60 million. Pissarro, like Monet, painted nature in the countryside around Paris. Renoir is famous for the people he painted. However, even though he wasn’t focusing on nature, he used the Impressionist rules: visible brushstrokes and lots of natural light. One of the 30 original painters in the 1874 exhibition was Berthe Morisot. She was a successful professional artist from a rich family who learned her skills by copying paintings in the Louvre gallery. In 2013, she became one of the most expensive female artists in the world, when one of her paintings sold for almost £7 million.
What came next?
Impressionism inspired a new way of painting. From France it spread to Britain and the US. In the US the first big exhibition of Impressionist art was held in 1886. Artists including Philip Wilson Steer in the UK and William Merritt Chase in the US were inspired by the painters. A famous artist who is still working today, David Hockney, created a series of paintings on his iPad that were inspired by the Impressionists.
Celebrating Impressionism around the world
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris has the largest collection of Impressionist paintings in the world, and has sent out a number of them to museums and galleries around France to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the movement. In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum is displaying Impressionist artists’ work including Monet and Renoir; and the Dallas Museum of Art in the US is hosting a special exhibition all about the rise of Impressionism.