Collection: Impressionism

Impressionism was a French art movement that developed in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s and reached its public form between 1874 and 1886. The movement takes its name from Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise, exhibited in 1874. The critic Louis Leroy used the title to mock the group in his review of their first independent exhibition, and the painters subsequently adopted the term as their own.

The movement was defined by a specific set of technical practices. Painters used short, visible brushstrokes and applied unmixed pigments side by side, exploiting simultaneous contrast rather than blending colours on the palette. They mixed complementary colours to obtain darker tones rather than using black. Most worked outdoors, in the practice known as en plein air, in order to record the changing effects of natural light. Subject matter was drawn from contemporary life, including urban scenes, suburban leisure, and landscape, rather than from history or mythology.

The principal members of the group were Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot. The American painter Mary Cassatt joined the group in Paris. They organised eight independent exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 under the name Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs. Pissarro was the only member to participate in all eight.

Impressionism faced sustained opposition from the official Salon and the academic establishment but gained gradual public acceptance from the 1880s onward. Its techniques spread internationally during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the United States, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Scandinavia, and Australia, where they shaped the development of national schools of modern painting.