What is Impressionism?

© 2020 Paul O’Neill This booklet is copyright Paul O’Neill 2020. Some of the painting from the first exhibition.

The Impressionist Timeline

'Impression, Sunrise' by Claude Monet. The title of this painting gave a name to the new art. All the artists in the exhibition were eventually given the label impressionist.

Art historians usually place Impressionism in the 1870s and 1880s, the original movement ended with the final group exhibition in 1886.

Neo Impressionism and Post Impressionism are defined as starting in 1886 and ending in the first decade of the 20th century.

What Is Impressionism? At first Impressionism was not a well defined art style. The Impressionists were rather a collection of mostly young artists who were rebelling against the French art mainstream of the time. The artists who took part in the first independent exhibition tend to be labelled as Impressionists but not all of them actually had an impressionist style. The first exhibition was organised by Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, Sisley and Berthe Morisot. It included the work of 30 artists, about 165 works in total.

When you look at the work of some of the artists, Morisot, Sisley, Monet, Renoir … there is similarity in their styles but then look at say Cézanne and his art was quite 'Chestnut trees at Osny' by Camille Pissarro different. The two paintings below have a lot in common. Both are female portraits done in pastel on paper. But they are so different, it demonstrates how far the Impressionists had moved away from the art of the 18th century.

A pastel painting by Maurice Quentin de La Tour

Part of a pastel on paper painting by Renoir, 1889 'The Cradle' by Berthe Morisot

The style of painting that we often think of as Impressionism was later developed by artists like Monet, Renoir and Sisley. It is often characterised by short broken brush strokes of bright colour and in the case of landscapes they often used open compositions. The emphasis is on accurately capturing the effects of light on a subject rather than focusing on the details of the subject.

Many of the impressionists changed their style as they developed, Monet moved more towards abstraction and Renoir changed to using thin glazes of colour .

Note that impressionism moved away from mainstream art not just in technique and style but also in subject matter. The Impressionists preferred to paint ordinary people rather than lords and ladies. Impressionism helped to make the ordinary more acceptable in art. In this respect Impressionism was following Realism. More than one kind of Impressionism How Impressionism has influenced my art

In addition to the three forms of impressionism already mentioned there is a 1886 was the start of two offshoots from Impressionism. fourth form called Abstract Impressionism. It started in New York in or around 1940. Not all art historians or critics acknowledge Abstract Post Impressionism was not a movement as such but rather a group of Impressionism as a legitimate movement because they say there is not individuals who took Impressionism as their starting point then developed in enough to distinguish art of this movement from art in movements like different ways. Expressionism.

Paul Gaugin kept the bright colours of Impressionism but rejected the need to My landscapes and stilllifes are tending towards more abstraction. And paint from nature. Of course he was inspired by nature but he believed the Abstract Impressionism might be an accurate description of how I see my artist can introduce imagination into the mix. art. But I reject the idea that my art is similar to expressionism or abstract expressionism. Expressionist art distorts reality in order to provoke a Vincent Van Gogh also kept the bright colors and painted from nature but he reaction in the viewer. My landscape art does not distort reality, rather I try developed his own unique use of colour and brushwork and used his paintings to capture an impression of the Irish landscape. I want the viewer to feel to bring his inner world out for others to see. relaxed, to feel that they are in the landscape. I think it was Renoir who said something like - a good landscape painting makes me want to take a walk Paul Cézanne worked from nature but with small exploratory brush strokes through that landscape. that built up into planes of colour. Both Picasso and Matisse saw Cézanne as the start of modern art and the Cubist art movement.

There were other Post Impressionists:

Odilon Redon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Émile Henri Bernard

As mentioned above Post Impressionism is often seen as the link between 19th century art and the “modern art” that appeared in the 20th century.

Neo Impressionism was perhaps the first marriage of art and science. The marriage ended in divorce in 1910. Artists like Seurat were interested in some of the science of the time that investigated how humans perceive colour. Rather than using brushstrokes or planes of colour they used small dots of pure colour. As you step back from the painting your eyes can no longer resolve the small dots of colour and they merge and blend, it was called optical blending. Using this technique the artist could mix colours on the retina of the observer rather than on the palette or the canvas as other artists did. Towards the end of this movement there were some young artists like Matisse who experimented with the style but sometimes used larger broken brush strokes that could be resolved by the eye. So they had stepped away from the science and were only using the style of Neo Impressionism. The style of Neo-Impressionism is sometimes called pointilism, it requires a serious amount of patience, a small painting could take months to complete. Pissaro towards the end of his career attempted pointilism. But it took him ages to complete each painting and his dealer couldn’t sell many of the finished canvases. As a result his family descended into poverty. Eventually he was persuaded to go back to his impressionist style and he started making a good living from his art. All images © 2020 Paul O’Neill