1. The Impressionist Revolt against Academic
Painting. The word “impressionism” is applied to a
style of painting which flourished, especially in France,
during the eighteen-seventies. Most of the impres-
sionists emphasized effects of sunlight and color in
landscape, as produced by a technique of painting in
perceptible, contrasting brush-strokes and dabs of rela-
tively unmixed colors. The concept of impressionism
was later extended to somewhat analogous styles in
other arts, including sculpture, music, and literature.
Impressionist painting spread to England, the United
States of America, and other countries. During the
eighteen-eighties it developed along divergent lines
which led to post-impressionism and various twen-
tieth-century styles. It is still practiced to a lesser extent
by conservative painters, sometimes in combination
with other techniques.
This article will deal mainly with impressionism in
painting, but will touch also on some of its historical
and cultural relationships, including analogous styles
in other arts.
The following are usually classed as impressionists:
Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Paul
Cézanne, Edgar Degas, James A. McNeill Whistler,
Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot.
Georges Seurat is sometimes classed as an impres-
sionist; more often as a post-impressionist or pointillist.
The leaders of impressionism in the eighteen-
seventies differed considerably as individuals. They
produced several new styles, which can be regarded
as variants of impressionism. Some of them painted in
the impressionist manner at times and differently at
other times. They were united for a while by a spirit
of revolt against the official Paris Salon. This led some
of them to exhibit as a group in the Salon des Refusés,
beginning in 1874. Their aim was to show the public
experimental works of the kind which they had been
exhibiting separately, and which had been rejected by
the ultraconservative juries of the official Salon. As a
group and as individual artists, they made a lasting
contribution to art in helping to free the painter from
outworn, academic rules, and in calling his attention
to the wealth of color and light in the world about
him. The impetus they gave to a progressive, experi-
mental attitude in all the arts has lasted up to the
present day, even though the attention of style leaders
has moved on to other tasks and methods.
The nature of this contribution can be most clearly
understood by contrasting it with the academic tradi-
tion of the official Paris Salon, which exercised great
power by appointing juries to decide which contem-
porary works could be exhibited under its favorable
auspices. Year after year, the Salon favored dramatic,
religious, historical, and mythological scenes, often in
a rather tightly formal, monumental style of composi-
tion, symmetrical or firmly balanced, and self-
contained. It favored smooth, gracefully neo-classical
forms, emphasizing line and solid shape rather than
color and light, and modeled in a weak version of the
sculptural style of Raphael and the Florentine Renais-
sance. As in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-
1665) and J. A. D. Ingres (1780-1867), color was sec-
ondary to line, mass, and perspective. It was usually
added after the composition, highlights, and dark
shadows had been sketched in without it. Usual subjects
were the parks, palaces, wars, and amusements of the
rich and the noble in all their luxury, in addition to
trivial genre scenes, pretty nudes, and sentimental con-
versation pieces. Academic art often tended to flatter
the government and the wealthy bourgeoisie, as well
as the hereditary aristocracy and the higher clergy.
Typical academic painters of the eighteen-fifties were
Thomas Couture and William Adolphe Bouguereau.
Most academic or Salon painting was done in the
studio; most impressionist painting out of doors. The
latter was based more on direct observation of nature.
The Salon pictures tended to make all figures and
objects almost equally sharp and clear, except in the
misty, aerial perspective of distant horizons. Impres-
sionists saw that even under the clearest weather con-
ditions, only those parts of the field of vision on which
attention is focused have maximum sharpness; others
seem somewhat vague, blurred, or shadowy. So it was,
in a sense, realistic to represent them so. Likewise,
according to the impressionists, the eyes tend to see
some reflected color in shadows. To represent them
so is realistic and also enriches the texture of the whole
picture.
The impressionists favored a direct, painterly ap-
proach to the canvas in terms of pure colors, with little
or no mixture on the palette. Instead of beginning with
a dark surface for the shadows and gradually building
up the highlights through a succession of lighter glazes,
they followed from the start various methods for
achieving a lighter, brighter surface. One method
(sometimes practiced by Manet) was to begin with a
very light surface and gradually to fill in the darker
areas, putting shadows where they would help produce
a luminous design, full of contrasts (Figure 1).
The characteristics most commonly associated with
the name “impressionism” are those of Claude Monet.
They are found to some extent in the work of others
of the group, but not all of them, and even Monet did
not always use this method. These characteristics
(called stylistic traits) consist (1) in representing scenes
in such a way as to emphasize the reflections of sunlight
on colored objects out of doors, including the vibrating
or shimmering effect which sunlight often produces;
(2) as a means to this end, the technique of juxtaposing
small strokes or dabs of different unmixed colors
closely together. This method has been called “broken
color” or “divided color” and also, “vibrism” or “divi-
sionism.” In such painting, color and light tend to
dominate over line and solid shape. These remain, but
the contours of objects are often somewhat blurred and
their relative distances obscured by the brilliance of
the colored surfaces. Extremely bright, shimmering
tonalities are often achieved by this method, but not
always. Dimmer effects of winter, mist, or evening
half-lights are also sought; in each case with a definite
tonality approximating one observable in the everyday
world (Figure 2).
Degas sometimes used divided color in his ballet
scenes, not to represent sunlight, but for a general
effect of rich color and artificial luminosity, as under
a theater spotlight.
