The Art of Impressionism

Among the most received artistic stint in the world, Impressionism brought us many of the artists that are today classic names. From Monet and Cassatt to Degas and Pissarro, some of the true giants of the art world stamped their mark in the time of this period. Today, the works of the impressionists can be found at the museums around the world, on posters and postcards and, best of all, now also in accurately reproduced hand painted oil painting reproductions.



Impressionism was itself a 19th-century art movement which started out as a blurred association of Paris-based artists who came to prominence through a number of individualist exhibitions in the 1870s and 1880s. The name of the movement can be credited to one of the most famous and iconic images of the movement - Claude Monet’s work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). It was not initially meant as a accolade, however. Instead, the work aggravated critic Louis Leroy to make up the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

The characteristics of Impressionist paintings include noticeable brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the absorption of movement as a crucial part of human cognition and self-knowledge, and unusual visual angles. Following its emergence as an art movement, these ideas soon found their way to analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

Impressionism was proposed a radical movement at the time, as their activities broke the set rules of academia when it came to painting. They colored unconventionally, freely brushed and held primacy over line. They also carried away their art out of the studios and into the world. Where it had at one time been the code for painters of even landscapes to do such work indoors, the impressionists freely went into wide world in order to experience it and have it leave its impression on them. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they portrayed overall visual effects instead of details. They used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed color, not smoothly amalgamated or shaded, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense color vibration.

Impressionism initially came about in France. While there were at the time other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, who were also at this time discovering the art of plein-air painting, the Impressionists improved new techniques for this purpose that were specific to the impressionist movement. Focusing on what its followers called a new and different way of seeing, it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of color. See the below art reproductions of impressionist paintings.



The initial public reaction to the impressionist movement was hostile. Clearly, this was not painting in the way of the famous masters and according to the set standards of the time. However, as does often happen, the public in time did come around, gradually seeing how the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the agreement of the art critics and establishment. The ability of impressionism to re-create the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became a precursor seminal to various movements in painting which would follow, along with Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.