What Is Impressionism? Light, Colour, and a New Way of Painting

Impressionist painters often worked with loose, separate brushstrokes rather than smoothing every transition until individual marks disappeared. From nearby, a surface can look broken into touches of colour. From farther away, those marks combine into figures, reflections, buildings, trees, and atmosphere. This makes the viewer's own perception part of the painting.

A useful answer to what Impressionism is also includes subject matter. Artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro painted landscapes, city streets, leisure, domestic life, cafes, gardens, and other scenes from the world around them. Modern life could be considered worthy of serious painting.

Impressionists were fascinated by how the same place could look different depending on weather, season, or time of day. Shadows are not simply black, snow is not simply white, and water can carry colours from the sky and nearby objects. Painters used neighbouring colours and varied brushwork to suggest those shifting effects.

Monet famously returned to some subjects many times, painting them under different conditions. When studying Impressionism, this repeated observation is useful. The goal was not always to record every tiny detail of an object. The changing relationship between light, colour, atmosphere, and perception could be more important than a sharply finished outline.

Many Impressionists struggled with the official exhibition system in Paris, where juries decided which works would appear in prestigious Salons. A group of artists eventually organised independent exhibitions, beginning in 1874. The word Impressionism itself developed from criticism surrounding Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise,' though the artists were not identical in style or goals.

Understanding Impressionism means avoiding the idea that every Impressionist painting follows one recipe. Some artists focused on landscape, others on people or interiors. Edgar Degas, for example, often worked differently from Monet. What linked the movement was a broader willingness to experiment with modern subjects, unusual viewpoints, visible technique, and new ways of recording visual experience.

Academic painting in the 1860s prized a smooth surface on which no brushstroke showed, dark studio lighting, and subjects drawn from history, myth or scripture. Against that standard an Impressionist canvas looked like a sketch: bright, loosely handled, apparently made in an afternoon, and about nothing more important than a boating party.

Two technical changes made the new look possible. Paint sold in portable metal tubes let artists work outdoors in front of the subject, and newly available synthetic pigments gave them the strong blues, violets and greens the movement is known for. Working quickly outside also changed what got painted. A cloud moves, so the artist learns to record the effect of light rather than the object underneath it. That habit is the movement's real legacy, and it runs straight into Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and much of twentieth-century painting.

Impressionism did not grow only from French painting. From the 1850s, trade with Japan brought woodblock prints to Paris, and many artists collected them. Monet owned a large collection that still hangs in his house at Giverny. These prints showed flat areas of bright colour, strong diagonal compositions, high or unusual viewpoints and figures sliced off by the edge of the picture. Degas and others borrowed these devices, which helps explain why some Impressionist scenes feel casually framed rather than carefully centred like a history painting.

Photography was the other new influence. Early cameras could crop a street scene at random, freeze a passing figure mid-step and flatten depth in ways the human eye does not notice. Degas was interested in photography and took pictures himself, and his paintings of dancers and racecourses often have that snapshot quality. At the same time, the camera's ability to record detail pushed some painters to ask what painting could do that a photograph could not, and capturing colour, light and sensation was one answer.

Two of the most important Impressionists were women. Berthe Morisot took part in the first group exhibition in 1874 and showed work in all but one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held up to 1886. Mary Cassatt, an American living in Paris, was invited to join the group by Degas and first exhibited with them in 1879. Both were respected by their colleagues, and Cassatt also helped introduce Impressionist painting to American collectors, which helped the movement find buyers outside France.

Their subjects were shaped by the social rules of the time. A respectable middle-class woman in Paris could not freely sit alone in cafes, bars or backstage at the ballet, where Degas and Manet found many of their scenes. Morisot and Cassatt painted the worlds they could enter: drawing rooms, gardens, balconies, theatre boxes and scenes of women and children. These were not lesser subjects. Their pictures record parts of modern life that male painters rarely saw from the inside, and Morisot's especially quick, feathery brushwork was among the boldest in the group.

Impressionism is often pictured as a group of artists dashing off every canvas in the open air, but practice was more varied. Painting outdoors, known as plein air painting, mattered a great deal, yet it brought practical struggles. When Monet painted his large Women in the Garden in the 1860s, he reportedly had a trench dug so the canvas could be lowered and he could reach its upper parts. Many outdoor paintings were reworked indoors afterwards, and Monet finished his series of Rouen Cathedral paintings in his studio at Giverny, long after he had left Rouen.

Late in life Monet built a large new studio at Giverny, completed during the First World War, so that he could paint the huge water lily canvases that now fill two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris. Degas, meanwhile, rarely painted outdoors and was openly scornful of the fashion for it. His racecourses and ballet scenes were built from drawings, memory and studio work, and their casual snapshot look was carefully constructed. The fresh, spontaneous appearance of Impressionist painting was a style the artists reached by many routes, not proof that every brushstroke was laid down on the spot.

The Impressionists drew on colour science as well as observation. In 1839 the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who supervised dyes for the Gobelins tapestry works, published a study of how neighbouring colours affect each other. Placed side by side, complementary pairs such as orange and blue or red and green make each other look more intense. Painters used this to make light sing, and they also noticed that shadows are rarely grey. On a sunny day, shadows on snow are lit by the blue sky rather than the yellow sun, so Monet and others painted them blue or violet.

Monet's Impression, Sunrise shows another effect. The orange sun looks brilliant, yet researchers who have measured the painting point out that it has almost exactly the same brightness as the grey-blue sky around it. In a black and white photograph the sun nearly disappears. Because the parts of our vision that judge position and movement respond to brightness rather than colour, a shape that differs only in hue seems slightly unstable, and the sun appears to shimmer. A common misconception is that the Impressionists painted in tiny dots of pure colour. That systematic method belongs to Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists.

Impressionism is a nineteenth-century art movement that explored light, colour, modern life, and the act of seeing through relatively visible and flexible brushwork. Instead of treating an Impressionist painting as unfinished, look at how separate marks, changing light, and everyday subjects create its distinctive effect.