Impressionism

About

In 1874 a group of painters tired of rejection by the official Salon organised their own exhibition in Paris, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar. Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne and Berthe Morisot were among the exhibitors, and seven more shows followed until 1886.

The painters worked outdoors or from direct observation and aimed to record the look of a moment. Look for visible, comma-like strokes, colours set side by side rather than blended, coloured shadows and casual, cropped compositions. Subjects are modern: boating parties, railway stations, cafés and boulevards, as in Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876). Degas and Gustave Caillebotte favoured city streets and interiors, and Mary Cassatt painted women at home. A hostile review had named the group after Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872), and Monet's later series of haystacks and water lilies pushed towards abstraction.