At the first Impressionist exhibition, a group of painters committed to naturalistic representation, color theory, and experimentation with photography mounted a show meant to challenge the Parisian art establishment’s aesthetics. Although not initially a success, the exhibition announced the emergence of modernist art, paving the way for post-Impressionism, abstract expressionism, Fauvism, cubism, and a host of other movements that owe their existence in part to French Impressionism.
On April 15, 1874, thirty artists who had joined forces the previous December as the Société Anonyme des Artistes
The prime movers behind both the Société Anonyme des Artistes and the exhibition were members of a small group of painters who were discouraged by persistent official rejection of their work. They had become determined to loosen the academy’s strangehold on the Parisian art world’s aesthetics and sales. Claude Monet
The six friends, soon joined by the like-minded Berthe Morisot
As early as 1867, the Batignolles artists dreamed of having their own group show. Given their poverty, however, they had to content themselves with occasionally getting their more conservative works accepted by the Salon and having small, one-artist shows in private galleries. In 1873, however, they felt more than usually disgusted with the Salon jury, which seemed to be repeating the extreme intolerance it had shown a decade earlier, when it had dismissed 70 percent of the five thousand submissions it received. In the earlier decade the government of Napoleon III had responded to the protests of hundreds of artists by arranging for the rejected works to be displayed separately in the Salon des Refusés (exhibition of rejects). Pissarro
A sixty-franc annual membership fee brought in enough money to fund the 1874 exhibition—a month-long display of 165 oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, prints, and sculptures
The exhibition’s oil paintings in particular established the movement’s iconoclastic trademarks. These included representing contemporary people and ordinary scenes; capturing fleeting moments in middle- or working-class life or in nature’s rhythms; using bold colors on canvases free of the dark under-painting beloved by the academy; conveying the light, motion, or energy of the subject through short, rapid brushstrokes; intensifying the immediacy of scenes through cropped figures and props or through flattened perspective; painting entire pictures outdoors (en plein air), rather than finishing them in the studio; and rendering shadows through complementary pigments rather than black—for instance, blue-green shade for trees in an orange sunset.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
To encourage working-class visitors, the society kept the exhibition open from eight to ten o’clock in the evenings. Although they managed to attract thirty-five hundred people (paying 1 franc apiece) and to sell 3,600 hundred francs’ worth of pieces, after costs their 949-franc profit did not even cover all the members’ dues. Worse, their venture provoked extreme hostility from most critics, who especially attacked what, by academic standards, they considered the unfinished quality of the paintings.
Monet’s
Leroy
Aux Courses en province (1869; at the races in the country), Pissarro’s
Le Verger (1872; the orchard), Morisot’s
Le Berceau (1872; the cradle), and Renoir’s
La Loge (1874; the theater box). Although these last two paintings were among the few that received praise, it was arguably Monet’s Impression: Soleil levant that proved most influential. Within the year, the label it had inspired Leroy
While the 1874 exhibition was hardly a financial or critical success, it led to seven more group showings in the next twelve years, as well as to the 1879 creation of a journal dedicated to Impressionism, La Vie moderne (modern life), with an art gallery adjoining the journal’s offices. The public debut also encouraged the group’s select supporters, among them the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel
The first Impressionist exhibition was a crucial step in liberating its participants and their successors from the academy’s long dictatorship over French art. The painters of the next artistic generation (some of whom were the same age as the Impressionists) started out as Impressionists and only eventually found their individual paths into the various styles titled Post-Impressionism. They included Cézanne
By insisting on portraying the world they lived and worked in—both urban and rural—the participants in the first Impressionist exhibition introduced and privileged the modern moment as a an inspiration equal to traditional subjects. By displaying their experimentation with different techniques for best capturing the flux of this moment, they also opened up new directions in representing space and time. While their interest in both photography
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Bomford, David, Jo Kirby, John Leighton, and Ashok Roy. Art in the Making: Impressionism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990. A technical but accessible analysis of fifteen paintings from London’s National Gallery, with an introductory essay on the materials, studios, and traditions of the nineteenth century art world. -
Brettell, Richard R. Impression: Painting Quickly in France, 1860-1890. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. This lavishly illustrated book by a professor of aesthetic studies focuses on the theory, meaning, and technique behind particularly “unfinished,” or quickly executed, Impressionist paintings. -
Denvir, Bernard. The Chronicle of Impressionism: An Intimate Diary of the Lives and World of the Great Artists. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. A journal-format survey of the movement’s origins, exhibitions, career divergences, and legacy. Excerpts from critical reviews, letters, and diaries provide a fascinating cultural context for more than four hundred paintings. -
_______. The Thames and Hudson Encyclopedia of Impressionism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990. Covers the movement’s people, places, events, and techniques in admirably precise entries. -
Tinterow, Gary, and Henri Loyrette. Origins of Impressionism. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994. Nine essays focus on the movement’s achievements in different genres of nineteenth century painting.
Paris Salon of 1824
Barbizon School of Landscape Painting Flourishes
Delacroix Paints Liberty Leading the People
Daguerre and Niépce Invent Daguerreotype Photography
Paris’s Salon des Refusés Opens
Metropolitan Museum of Art Opens
Post-Impressionist Movement Begins
Toulouse-Lautrec Paints At the Moulin Rouge
Munch Paints The Scream
Paul Cézanne; Edgar Degas; Paul Gauguin; Vincent van Gogh; Édouard Manet; Napoleon III; Camille Pissarro; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Georges Seurat; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Émile Zola.