Impressionism
A critic's joke about one hazy sunrise named a movement that banished black and painted shadows blue.
- First exhibition
- April 1874, Paris
- Named by
- Louis Leroy, Le Charivari, 1874
- Paint tube patent
- John Goffe Rand, 1841
In April 1874 a group of painters, including Claude Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas and Berthe Morisot, held their own show in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, outside the official Salon. The critic Louis Leroy mocked Monet's Impression, Sunrise in the paper Le Charivari, calling the group 'Impressionists'. They took the name, and showed together eight times by 1886.
Their color was new. Working outdoors, they caught passing light with short broken strokes of unmixed color. They mostly gave up black and the old earth browns, mixing darks from complements instead, and painted shadows with the blue and violet of the sky. Monet's series, like Rouen Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament, show one subject changing color through the day: color constancy switched off on purpose.
Chemistry helped. Bright synthetic pigments, among them cobalt blue, viridian, synthetic ultramarine and chrome yellow, were on sale by the 1840s, and paint came in the collapsible tin tube patented by John Goffe Rand in 1841. Renoir's son reported him saying that without tubes there would have been no Impressionism, though historians note that portable paint alone doesn't explain the style.
The next generation pushed the science further. Seurat and Signac, who showed at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, turned broken color into dots (optical mixing, La Grande Jatte), and Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886 and brightened his palette within months. See also warm and cool.
Swatches
- Blue · shadows
- Violet · shadows
- Orange · sunlight
- Cobalt · new pigment
- Viridian · new pigment
Colors
Sources
- Musée d'Orsay (2024). Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism.
- Callen, A. (2000). The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity. Yale University Press.
- Bomford, D. et al. (1990). Art in the Making: Impressionism. National Gallery, London.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.