How Impressionism got its name and what gave rise to it?

How Impressionist art got its name?

The word “impressionism” owes its origin to a title that Monet gave to one of his paintings. It happened in a whimisical decision that took no more than a moment – a perfect naming ceremony for an art style that focuses on capturing fleeting moments. This is how Claude Monet recounted the story: “they asked me for a title” for a painting of the French harbour of Le Havre. His tentative response was: “Put Impression.” He picked that term in acknowledgement that his painting was not more than a mere impression of the real Le Havre. The painting would later acquire the full title Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) before it went on display (view painting here). A conservative art critic, Louis Leroy, coined the word “impressionism” as an insult to Monet’s unconventional work in a satiric review. As in contemporary language where “geek” or “gay” are reclaimed by those the words are meant to abuse, Monet and similar artists embraced the label and became “Impressionists.”

What gave rise to Impressionism? And where?

Society

In the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization of Western Europe introduced set working hours. That meant the expanding middle class could start having, as we do today, planned vacations. In France, going to the beach or vacationing in a country house was fashionable for urbanites seeking to escape their filthy cities, crowded factories and workshops. Many of those urbanites were nouveau riche and unaccustomed to the modern lifestyle of steady income and spare time – no wonder some of them are absurdly overdressed for the beach (view painting here), even by the standards of their own time. (Who goes to relax on the beach in a three-piece suit?!) The regular income created a commercial opportunity for artists to document the activities of domestic tourists, interested in paintings as souvenirs. Parisians of that period sought relevant scenes from their own contemporary lives, rather than “high art” with Graeco-Roman or biblical themes destined for museums and art academies.

Thanks to the invention of paint tubes, a revolutionary change had been quietly transforming the painting process since the 1840s: en plein air paining (“in the open air”). No longer artists had to sketch outdoors and finish the paintings in their studios. One of the early adopters of outdoor painting was Eugène Boudin. He was a major influence on young Claude Monet when they met in 1858. Years later, Monet would become the leader and founder of Impressionism. He accompanied Boudin to the seashore where he learnt painting directly from nature. Monet’s experimental style aimed at colorfully recording the light at certain moments. Ultimately, it would be the Impressionists who’d popularize outdoor painting and bring it to a mass audience.

Monet was originally joined by three other artists: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille. In 1874, Impressionist artists displayed their paintings for the first time in a private exhibition.

Technology

1. Paint tubes: painting goes portable

Pierre-Auguste Renoir once said “without tubes of paint, there would have been no Impressionism.” The new invention provided easy transport and long-term storage of paint. Probably, the last thing your mind could associate with great pre-Impressionist European paintings is, uhm, pig bladders. But that’s what the small pouches were made of to store paint. The industrial revolution didn’t only transform the world around artists, but also the very tools they used. With easily portable paint tubes, the Impressionists were not hindered from experimenting with outdoor painting at different times of the day, and under various light and weather conditions.

You might think the Impressionists found their work easy enough since they no longer needed to worry about the inconvenience of transporting paint in pig bladders or even be confined to their own studios, but that was still far from enough! They created a new painting technique which was incredibly genius (lazy, according to their critics). Instead of “slaving away” at mixing colours on a palette, as artists had always done, they applied the colours directly from the tubes onto the canvas. Let the eye of the observer do all the necessary colour mixing! The art critic, Louis Leroy’s sarcastic response was “what ease of workmanship. Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”

2. Photographs versus paintings

Impressionist art was born at a time when photography, after decades of refining, was becoming increasingly sought after. A deep look into Impressionism will find the spirit of photography within it, and simultaneously a reaction against it. In one of the earliest and best examples of machines replacing humans, artists no longer received commissions for portrait paintings. A camera could produce a more accurate job, albeit in black and white, at a significantly faster speed. That deprived artists from a much needed source of income, which was as old as the Renaissance – Da Vinci himself was a portrait painter. Seeing that photography was also about to step in for recording historic moments and important ceremonies, many declared “painting is dead.” Painters realized their works could not compete with photographs in their documenation of reality. Artists found themselves facing questions such as, why replicate visible reality anymore? could paintings compete with an industrial machine in producing fine details? The answer was obviously negative and that led them into the innovative path of experimenting with light and color. Realistic representational art, which had been dominant in visual Western art, going back to the Greek and Roman eras, seemed to hit a deadend. That led the artist to prefer to dive into one’s own psyche in order to channel a personal perception onto the canvas, producing something that photographs lacked.

Rather than have models pose rigidly for them, Impressionists captured on canvas moments in the lives of ordinary people in a sense of spontaneity that was inspired by photography. The Star – Dancer on Stage (“L’Etoile – La Danseuse sur la Scene“) is painted like a photograph (view painting here).