DiscoverFrance! home page

Recommend Us! Guest Book Advertising Web Hosting Site Map Help! E-mail

.

Culture, history,
language, travel,
and more!

.
.
GO!
Pull down window to select topic, then click GO!

 

Art History Webmasters Association

Enter your e-mail address to receive updates about
DiscoverFrance.net!

World Wide Arts Resources

Search terms:

In Association with Amazon.com

Bonjour!

Vote for this website!

DISCOVER FRANCE
TRAVEL CENTER

Airline Tickets

Car Rentals

Currency

Hotels, Condos

Medical

Rail Passes

This menu is powered
by Agum Network

Search this site

Click above to
search this site
or the Internet.

Visit our Boutique!

Click above
to visit our
Boutique!

Music while you browse

Click above for
optional background
music while you browse!

Random quote generator

Click above to see
random quotations!

visiteur numéro

E-stat

Art Boutique - a Supergallery for French Art Prints and Framing
VISIT OUR ART BOUTIQUE TO BROWSE IMPRESSIONIST ART PRINTS


Art Periods: IMPRESSIONISM

Impressionism, the leading development in French painting in the later 19th century and a reaction against both the academic tradition and romanticism, refers principally to the work of Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and other artists associated with them, such as Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, who shared a common approach to the rendering of outdoor subjects. Impressionism also refers to the work of artists who participated in a series of group exhibitions in Paris, the first and most famous of which was held from April 15 to May 15, 1874, at the studio of the photographer Nadar.

Young Woman Sewing In the Garden

"Young Woman Sewing In the Garden"
by Mary Cassatt

The artists represented at the exhibition, or in the succeeding ones held by the group between 1876 and 1886, included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Jean Baptiste Armand Guillaumin, Berthe Morisot, and, after 1879, Paul Gauguin and the American artist Mary Cassatt.

The term impressionism was derived from a painting by Claude Monet -- Impression: Sunrise (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris), a view of the port of Le Havre in the mist -- and was coined for the group by the unfriendly critic Louis Leroy. Monet probably intended the title to refer to the sketchy, unfinished look of the work, similar to receiving an impression of something on the basis of an exposure that is partially obscured and incomplete in its detail. The term, however, was quickly taken up by sympathetic critics, who used it in an alternative sense to mean the impression stamped on the senses by a visual experience that is rapid and transitory, associated with a particular moment in time. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Sisley were impressionists in the latter sense; beginning in the later 1860s and culminating in 1872-75, they chose to paint outdoors (en plein air ), recording the rapidly changing conditions of light and atmosphere as well as their individual sensations before nature. They used high-key colors and a variety of brushstrokes, which allowed them to be responsive both to the material character and texture of the object in nature and to the impact of light on its surfaces.

If the term impressionism is used to indicate a concern for contemporary subject matter of an informal and pleasurable kind -- especially aspects of the social life of Paris and its environs -- and a technique and organization that gives an impression of casualness or spontaneity, then it includes not only the work of Degas and Morisot, but also that of Edouard Manet.

Classe danse

"Classe danse"
by Edgar Degas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

BUY DEGAS PRINTS

He did not exhibit with the group, but works such as his Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863; Musée d'Orsay, Paris) had an important influence on the younger painters during the 1860s. During the early 1870s, Manet was on friendly terms with the impressionists and adopted some of the same outdoor subjects.

Finally, when impressionism is extended to cover the early work of Gauguin and Cassatt, it reflects an influence of impressionism on a slightly younger group of artists, in their color range, brushwork, and approach to nature.

By the early 1880s the feeling of cohesiveness that had originally brought the impressionists together had begun to dissolve under the pressure of factions and rivalries. The sense of a shared approach to nature among the landscape painters had also dissolved by then, so that the artists increasingly took their own individual directions. At the same time, impressionism was beginning to have a tremendous impact both on French painting generally and also on the art of other countries; this continued well into the 20th century. Either directly or through the intermediacy of the developments of the 1880s, such as neoimpressionism and postimpressionism, impressionism influenced modern art in such fundamental features as a loosening up of brushwork, which abolished finally the traditional distinction between the finished painting and the preliminary sketch or study; a concern for the two-dimensional surface of a painting, which is defined by the patterns and feeling of movement of the paint on the ground; and a use of pure, bright colors.

In 1991, the news that two of Russia's major museums, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin in Moscow, had secretly stored a group of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings -- part of a vast collection looted from Germany by the USSR in the final months of World War II -- came as a revelation to the art world. Most of the paintings had come from private collections (some had previously been looted by the Nazis) and had not been seen in public for many decades. A few had never been exhibited; a few were believed to have been destroyed. Both museums exhibited many of these works, including paintings by Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, and Monet, in 1995.


Mark Roskill
Source: The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #9.01, ©1997
Bibliography: Steven Adams, The Impressionists (1994; out-of-print); Richard R. Brettell, French Impressionists (1987; out-of-print); B. Dunstan, Painting Methods of the Impressionists, rev. ed. (1983; repr. 1992); Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism - Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (1988); C. S. Moffett, The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886 (1989); Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904 (1966; out-of-print); Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (1967; repr. 1988); John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th ed. (1990; out-of-print) and Studies in Impressionism (1986); Gary Tinterow and Henri Loyrette, Origins of Impressionism (1994).
Images: Mary Cassatt - "Young Woman Sewing In the Garden"; "Classe danse (The Dancing class)" (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
Copyrights Notice and Disclaimer: Images of artists' works displayed throughout this site have been obtained from numerous sources, including digital libraries at educational institutions, educational software, and Mark Harden's Artchive. Credit is attributed when known. Some works are considered to be in the public domain, based on current U.S. and international copyright acts. For more information on copyright laws, please refer to the Artists Rights Society and Benedict O'Mahoney's The Copyright Web Site. [See also: DiscoverFrance.net Copyrights.]

Impressionism Links:

  • (links under construction)

 

SUGGEST A SITE
Do you know of a great Impressionism site we should list here? Please submit it!

Artists' Pages:

Art Topics:

This menu is powered by Agum Network

Discover France web ring

This ring site owned by DiscoverFrance.net

Features

Books & Videos

Revisit the era of the "Lost Generation" in Hemingway's Paris.

Explore the fascinating history of the prophet from Provence, Nostradamus.

Read the reviews of our carefully selected travel guides and recommended reading, then click to save 20-40% on books you purchase, with the convenience of home delivery.

Can't find your favorite French movies at the video store or library? Check out our selection of videotapes and DVDs featuring French movie icons like Depardieu, Deneuve, Montand, and many more. Then click to save 10-30% on your own personal copy delivered to your door!

Submissions

Host your web page with us!

DiscoverFrance.net actively encourages topical submissions from students of French language & culture, educators, seasoned travelers, American expatriates, and natives of France.

If you would like to share your experiences, knowledge or research with thousands of our visitors and friends, please send a note to the webmaster!

Are you an individual or business with a web page on any topic related to France -- arts, culture, entertainment, history, language, tourism, etc. -- in English or French? Your site can have an address of "www. discoverfrance. net/your_site" for less than $10 per month! Get more hits by affiliating with other francophile sites.

Tired of the Java commercial advertising windows and banners imposed by the so-called "free" web page hosting services? At DiscoverFrance.net, you can customize your page as you wish, without any commercial requirements or programming inserted into your HTML. Our web servers and Internet connections are fast, too.

For more information, please contact our sales staff!


Design and layout © 1997-1999

All Rights Reserved

Comments, suggestions,
broken links?

Made with Macintosh

The Wharton Group
and
Ian C. Mills

e-mail

The Y29K - compliant computer
preferred by designers everywhere.

This site
recycled

recycled

uses
electrons.

E-mail:
webmaster@discoverfrance.net

Text copyrights are attributed to their respective sources throughout this site.