Impressionism

Impressionism is a style of painting that began in France in the 1860s and 1870s. Impressionist painters used short, quick brushstrokes and bright colors to capture how a scene looked at one moment in time. They were less interested in fine details and more interested in light, weather, and the feeling of a place. The movement changed the rules of painting and helped lead to modern art.

Before Impressionism, most serious paintings were made inside studios. Artists painted careful scenes of history, religion, or rich people, with smooth brushwork and dark backgrounds. The Impressionists broke those rules. They carried their paints outdoors and worked in fields, gardens, train stations, and city streets. Painting outside is called working en plein air, which is French for "in the open air."

A new invention helped make this possible. In 1841, an American painter named John Goffe Rand put oil paint inside small metal tubes. Before that, paint dried out fast and was hard to carry. With paint tubes, artists could finally pack up and paint anywhere.

The most famous Impressionist was Claude Monet. He painted the same haystacks, water lilies, and cathedrals over and over, at different times of day. He wanted to show how sunlight changed everything it touched. Other important Impressionists included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot, one of the few women in the group. Mary Cassatt, an American, joined them in Paris and painted quiet scenes of mothers and children.

At first, critics hated the new style. They said the paintings looked unfinished, sloppy, and strange. The official Paris art shows refused most of them. So in 1874, the artists held their own show. A critic named Louis Leroy made fun of one Monet painting called Impression, Sunrise. He sneered that the whole group must be "Impressionists." The artists liked the word and kept it.

Up close, an Impressionist painting can look like a mess of colored dots and dashes. Step back, and a river, a dancer, or a sunset suddenly appears. The painters knew that human eyes mix colors on their own. A blue stroke next to a yellow stroke can read as green from across the room.

Impressionism opened the door for almost every art movement that followed, from Vincent van Gogh's swirling skies to Pablo Picasso's Cubism. Today, Monet's water lilies hang in museums all over the world. The paintings that critics once laughed at are now some of the most loved pictures ever made.