Impressionism Art

1. Impressionism

2. Introduction to Impressionism
• Started in the mid-19th century.
• Loose brush strokes, sketchy lines, and
blotches of color that blend together to
create the feeling of an impression.

3. • Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors,
Printmakers, etc.
• Among the founders of this movement was
French artist, Claude Monet

4. • In 1874, a group of artists got together and
mounted their own exhibition as an
alternative to the Salon.
• Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Berthe Morisot, Paul Cezanne, Edgar
Degas and Alfred Sisley were all part of
this group.

5. • The exhibit itself was not a success, but It
was an important first step: the first
independent group show of Impressionists
art.

6. • Seen as unfinished work
• Deemed as “offensive” and “insulting”.

7. Why offensive and insulting?
• The Impressionists chose to paint
everyday scenes from the world they
knew.
• The Impressionists used vibrant, light
colors, sometimes mixed directly on the
canvas, in strong contrast with the darker
palettes of traditional art.

8. • Impressionists applied their paint with
quick, spontaneous brushstrokes. There
were not concerned with a meticulous
finish.

9. Top Impressionists
• Claude Monet
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Edgar Degas
• Vincent van Gogh
• Paul Cezanne
• EdouardManet

10. Blurred Moving Figures
• Monet noticed that slow shutter speed
blurred moving figures and he began to
smudge his painted similarly in order to
achieve this blurry effect. This was just the
very beginning of the Blurring paint effect.

12. ARTWORKS
Claude Monet
"Rue Montorgueil,
Paris, Festival of
June 30, 1878
(1878)"

15. Haystacks

18. Playing with Light
• For the Impressionists, light was crucial for
capturing the brief moment of
apprehension by the viewer, and they tried
to show the ever-changing play of light on
a subject. Monet, for instance, would paint
the same scene several times to record
the changing light conditions at various
times of the day, such as in a series of
paintings of haystacks.
•

20. Brush Strokes
• The Impressionists also emphasized the brush
strokes on the canvas. According to Margaret
Samu of New York University, they tended to
use "short, broken brushstrokes that barely
convey forms." One of the most famous
examples is a painting by Georges Seurat, titled
"Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte," where the brush strokes were reduced
almost to a series of dots. This technique came
to be called "pointillism."

21. Everyday Subjects
• Impressionist painters used common,
simple scenes for their subjects. Workers
on vacation, women out for a stroll and
Parisian parks appear frequently in their
works. Up until that time, only art that
contained historical, religious and classical
themes was considered worthy to be hung
in galleries.
•

22. Other Genres of Art
• Painting was not the only medium that
Impressionists worked in. Degas, well known for
his paintings of dancers, also created sculptures,
while Auguste Rodin sculpted some of the most
famous statues in the world, such as "The
Thinker" and "The Kiss." In music, artists like
Claude Debussy sought to capture the same
shifting impressions in sound that the
Impressionist painters tried to represent on
canvas.

23. Characteristics of impressionism in
the visual arts:
• Closeness to nature
• Short and broken brush strokes
• Implies the unfinished, the
incomplete, the fleeting moment
• Playing with light
• Common and simple everyday
scenes

24. Sources
• Finocchio, Ross. “Nineteenth-Century French Realism.” Heilbrunn
Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 24
Oct. 2010. <http://www.metmuseum.org/&gt;.
• Samu, Margret. “Impressionism: Art and Modernity.” Heilbrunn
Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Web. 24
Oct. 2010. <http://www.metmuseum.org/&gt;.