Collection: Impressionism

Paris, April 1874. Thirty painters who had been rejected too often by the Salon jury rented the studio of the photographer Nadar on the boulevard des Capucines and hung their own exhibition. One of the canvases on the wall was Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, painted two years earlier in Le Havre harbour. The critic Louis Leroy fixed on the title in his review and used it to ridicule the entire show, writing that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than that seascape. The label stuck. The painters adopted it themselves.

Eight Impressionist exhibitions ran between 1874 and 1886. Camille Pissarro was the only artist who showed in all eight, an indication of how loose and quarrelsome the group was even at its closest. Pierre-Auguste Renoir brought the manner to bear on figure painting and the social life of dance halls. Edgar Degas stood slightly apart, more concerned with line and the asymmetric framing he absorbed from Japanese woodblock and from photography, but he shared the group's commitment to contemporary urban subjects.

The technical programme was specific. Short broken brushstrokes laid down rapidly, complementary colours mixed on the canvas rather than on the palette, no black on the painter's table, and as much work as possible done outdoors. The practice was made commercially viable by the new ready mixed paints in tin tubes, which had come onto the market in the 1840s and freed painters from the studio. The result was a body of paintings that treated light and weather as the primary subjects rather than as backdrops, with leisure, the modern city, river boating, suburban gardens, and the Norman coast supplying most of the images.

Two women shaped the movement from its first exhibition. Berthe Morisot brought to it a domestic intimacy that nothing else in nineteenth century French painting matched, and Mary Cassatt, an American working in Paris, focused the same impulse on mothers and children with structural intelligence drawn from her sustained study of the Japanese woodblock print. The prints gathered in this collection cover the movement across its many graphic forms: lithographs, etchings, drypoint, and the colour reproductions that carried the new manner across Europe and the United States from the 1880s onward.