Impressionism

Impressionism, the term applied to a modern school of art which, originating in France, is usually held to have been founded by Edouard Manet, and of which Claude Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, and De Césane are the best-known members. The impressionists may be said to have first appeared before the public in the special exhibition of the works of Manet and his followers which was held in Paris in 1867; and in 1874 and 1876 collections of their works were brought together in the Boulevard des Italiens and in the galleries of Durand Ruel, who in 1882 organised an exhibition of their productions in London; while a series of works by Monet were shown in 1889 in the Goupil Gallery, London. The aim of the impressionists is to rid themselves of the trammels of artistic tradition, and to look at nature—and portray her—in a fresh and original manner. They therefore strive to avoid such compromises and conventionalities of lighting, composition, &c. as have been frankly accepted by the art of the past, and to render with absolute truth their personal and immediate 'impressions' of nature. The members of the school accordingly separate themselves from the great so-called 'romantic' art of the last generation in France—the art of men like Corot, Decamps, Rousseau, and Daubigny—which is a legitimate and orderly development of the mighty art of the past; and—though they have more kinship with these—they are also to be distinguished from the plein-air painters of modern France, at whose head stands Bastien Lepage, and whose main aim is a careful and strictly scientific accuracy in their relative tones of colour. In their rejection of tradition and desire for a fresh, unconventional rendering of nature the impressionists are at one with the pre-Raphaelites of England; but, while the latter studied nature in a severely detailed and analytical manner, the former look on her in her large relations, and portray only such of her salient features as are visible on a cursory examination, and these they render by brushwork of the slightest, thinnest, and loosest description. From the pre-Raphaelites the impressionists are still more definitely separated by their want of care for intellectual or emotional interest in their pictures. In the words of one of their ablest exponents, they hold that the eye of the painter 'should abstract itself from memory, seeing only that which it looks upon, and that as for the first time; and the hand should become an impersonal abstraction, guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous cunning.' In the works of most of the impressionists little selection of subject or care for beauty of colour, form, or expression is visible; and their art, touching as it would seem by an instinctive preference on some of the most unlovely aspects of 19th-century existence, dealing with the life of the jockey and the ballet-girl, and portraying the worst atrocities of modern costume, has frequently fallen into dire depths of ugliness and vulgarity. Certain points of resemblance to the aims and methods of the impressionists are to be found in the works of such able painters as J. M. Whistler and J. S. Sargent, and still more distinctly in those of several of the younger Paris-trained English painters who have exhibited in the Suffolk Street Gallery and in the Nineteenth Century Art Club. In 1889 several young English painters, styling themselves 'London Impressionists,' and including B. and W. Sickert, P. Roussel, P. W. Steer, and Francis Bate, held an exhibition in the Goupil Gallery, London; and a pamphlet by the last-named painter—The Naturalistic School of Painting (2d ed. 1887)—contains the best exposition of the aims of the English section of the school.