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| Impressionist art is a style in which the artist captures the image of
an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it.
They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures
are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The
artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold
colors. Impressionism, the leading development in French painting in the
later 19th century and a reaction against both the academic tradition
and romanticism, refers
principally to the work of
Claude
Monet,
Pierre
Auguste Renoir, and other artists associated with them, such as
Camille Pissarro
and Alfred Sisley, who
shared a common approach to the rendering of outdoor subjects. The term Impressionism derives from Caude Monet's painting Impression: Sunrise. A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue of the exhibition in 1874. Monet suggested simply Impression, and the catalogue editor, Renoir's brother Edouard, added an explanatory Sunrise. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities. Impressionism often accentuates the effects of the passage of time. Using ordinary subject matter, Impressionism adds the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception, while focusing on unusual visual angles.  Impressionism also refers to the work of artists who participated in a
series of group exhibitions in Paris, the first and most famous of which
was held from April 15 to May 15, 1874, at the studio of the
photographer Nadar. The artists represented at the exhibition, or in the
succeeding ones held by the group between 1876 and 1886, included
Paul Cézanne,
Edgar Degas, Jean
Baptiste Armand Guillaumin,
Berthe Morisot, and, after 1879,
Paul
Gauguin and the American artist
Mary Cassatt. The group was
unified only by its independence from the official annual Salon, for
which a jury of artists from the Académie des Beaux-Arts selected
artworks and awarded medals. The independent artists, despite their
diverse approaches to painting, appeared to contemporaries as a group.
While conservative critics panned their work for its unfinished, sketch
like appearance, more progressive writers praised it for its depiction
of modern life.By the early 1880s the feeling of cohesiveness that had originally brought the impressionists together had begun to dissolve under the pressure of factions and rivalries. The sense of a shared approach to nature among the landscape painters had also dissolved by then, so that the artists increasingly took their own individual directions. At the same time, impressionism was beginning to have a tremendous impact both on French painting generally and also on the art of other countries; this continued well into the 20th century. Impressionism influenced modern art in such fundamental features as a loosening up of brushwork, which abolished finally the traditional distinction between the finished painting and the preliminary sketch or study. |
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