Impressionism

Impressionism took shape in Paris during the 1860s and 1870s, a moment of dramatic urban transformation. Under Napoleon III and city planner Baron Haussmann, Paris was rebuilt with wide boulevards, new parks, railway stations, and department stores, creating a modern city built around leisure, spectacle, and consumption. This new urban middle class had disposable income and free time, weekends at the theatre, boat trips on the Seine, evenings at the café, and it was this modern, everyday life that Impressionists chose to paint, rather than the historical, biblical, and mythological scenes favoured by the official Salon and the state-run École des Beaux-Arts. The Salon jury repeatedly rejected these artists' loose, informal work as unfinished and technically careless. After the notorious Salon des Refusés of 1863 (where rejected works were shown separately) and continued rejection through the 1860s, a group of painters led by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, and Berthe Morisot organised their own independent exhibitions beginning in 1874, deliberately bypassing the Salon system entirely. This act of institutional defiance was as significant historically as their painting style, it created a new, artist-controlled model for showing and selling work that later movements would also rely on.

Impressionist paintings are built from visible, broken brushstrokes rather than smooth, blended surfaces , you can see the individual dabs and streaks of paint up close. Colour is applied in small, distinct touches placed side by side (rather than pre-mixed on the palette), so that from a distance the eye optically blends them, producing a shimmering, vibrant effect closer to how light actually behaves. Painters worked "en plein air" (outdoors, in the open air) to observe real, changing daylight directly, often returning to the same subject at different times of day to study how light transformed it. Monet's later series paintings of haystacks, Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies pushed this idea to its logical extreme. Compositions are often informally cropped, as if caught in a passing glance, a look influenced by snapshot photography and by the flattened, asymmetrical framing of Japanese woodblock prints. Shadows are rendered in colour (blues, purples) rather than plain black or grey, another break from academic convention.

Socially, the rise of a leisured, spending middle class with time for boating, café culture, and weekend excursions gave Impressionists an entirely new bank of everyday subject matter that earlier more "serious" art had ignored. Technologically, the invention of ready-made, portable paint tubes (replacing pigments artists previously had to grind and mix themselves) made painting outdoors practical for the first time, while the rapid spread of photography pushed painters to ask what only paint could do that a camera could not, namely, capture the sensation of colour and atmosphere rather than an exact, static likeness. Geographically, the opening of trade with Japan in the 1850s flooded Europe with ukiyo-e woodblock prints, whose flattened perspective, cropped framing, and bold outlines visibly shaped Impressionist (and later Post-Impressionist) composition. Economically, a new class of independent art dealers, most notably Paul Durand-Ruel — began buying and promoting Impressionist work outside the Salon system, giving the artists a way to survive financially despite official rejection, and eventually exporting the movement's reputation to American collectors.

Impressionism was an important step in art history since it was the first major, organised step away from the assumption that art had to look "finished" or academically correct to be taken seriously. By painting ordinary modern life exactly as it appeared to the eye in a passing moment, the Impressionists gave later artists permission to paint their own perception of the world rather than an idealised, textbook version of it. I think what's most striking about the movement is how much of its radicalism was institutional as well as visual, by refusing the Salon and exhibiting independently, the Impressionists effectively invented the model of the artist-run exhibition that every subsequent avant-garde movement, from the Fauves to the Dadaists, would go on to use.