The Impressionism

Monet working in his boat - Edouard Manet, 1874

The Impressionism is considered the first distinctly modern movement in painting. This movement was started by Edouard Manet and his friends in 19 century in France. They wanted to discover the way to present the nature as we see it.

By that time there were academic concepts of drawing people and nature. There were rules that you had to use for painting. These rules were developing for many centuries from the Renaissance. Art students studied art in the academies where they learned how to draw and paint people properly. At first, they usually drew from plaster casts taken from antique statues, which they carefully modeled through different densities of shading. As soon as they learned this technique, they started using these rules for drawing people. Usually artists drew their models in their studios where the light falls through the window or from lamplight. It makes shades deeper and increase contrasts between light and shadow.

The Impressionists prefer to draw their models outside with the natural light. They thought models look more naturally lighted by the natural light than with the lamplight. Academic rules don’t fit completely with this concept of painting. They discovered that, if we look at the nature in the open, we don’t see individual objects each with its own color but rather a bright medley of tones which blend in our eye or really in our mind. One of the first paintings of people in this technique was made by Edouard Manet (The balcony, 1896).

The Balcony -  Edouard Manet, 1869

The Impressionism changed rules not only in paining people. There were some changes in painting nature too. From The Renaissance, artists didn’t paint whatever they want from nature. There was a meaning as ‘picturesque’ that contain determine pieces of nature. Artists painted only this ‘picturesque’ nature. The Impressionists changed these rules. They didn’t want to paint just some beautiful pieces of nature that you can call ‘picturesque’. They wanted to paint the light, the light laying on different surfaces, the light falling through different materials. That was the main purpose of their art. A painting ‘La Gare Saint-Lazare’ by Claude Monet is an example of this purpose. The artist was fascinated by the effect of light streaming through the glass roof on to the clouds of steam, and by the forms of engines and carriages emerging from the confusion.

La Gare Saint-Lazare - Claude Monet, 1877

One of Claude Monet’s paintings engendered the name ‘The Impressionism’. This painting is called ‘Impression: Sunrise’. One of the critics found this title ridiculous, and he referred to the whole group of artists as ‘The Impressionists’. He wanted to convey that these painters didn’t proceed by sound knowledge, and thought that the impression of a moment was sufficient to be called a picture. So firstly the name ‘The Impressionism’ had a mocking undertone but now it’s forgotten.

Impression: Sunrise - Claude Monet, 1872