The show that named itself by accident
In April 1874 a group of friends who were sick of being rejected — Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot — rented the studio of the photographer Nadar and put on their own show. A critic seized on the title of one Monet canvas, Impression, Sunrise, and sneered that the whole lot were mere impressions — sketches, not finished paintings. As usual, the painters eventually wore the insult as a badge.
Paint the light, not the thing
The Impressionists’ insight was almost a scientific one: you never actually see an object’s “true” color, only light bouncing off it at a particular moment. So they stopped painting the cathedral and started painting the light on the cathedral — Monet would later paint the same Rouen facade more than thirty times, the same stone reading pink at dawn and blue-gray in fog, the building almost an excuse. New tube paints let them work fast and outdoors, in front of the subject; they left the brushwork loose and laid pure dabs of color side by side so your own eye would mix them at a distance. A shadow was no longer brown. It was violet and blue.
Their subjects were just as new — not myth but modern leisure: boating parties, railway stations, dance halls, the wide boulevards of a freshly rebuilt Paris. Berthe Morisot, the one woman in the founding group, was no bystander: she organized nearly every one of the eight exhibitions and painted modern life from the private, domestic vantage — nurseries, drawing rooms, women at the mirror — that her male colleagues simply could not enter, which makes her work some of the most distinctive the movement produced. Edgar Degas, the awkward cousin of the group, stayed indoors and caught dancers and laundresses in off-balance, snapshot poses he learned partly from the camera and partly from Japanese woodblock prints — which were arriving in Paris as the wrapping paper around imported china, and teaching half the city to crop boldly and flatten space.
They won the argument so completely that “a nice Impressionist painting” is now practically a synonym for pleasant, inoffensive art — which would have astonished the people who first stood in front of these canvases and felt insulted. But by the mid-1880s the younger painters in the circle had begun to worry that, in chasing the fleeting light, they had let the picture itself go soft.