Impressionism

Boulevard des Capucines, 1874

The exhibition that named it

Before Impressionism was a style, it was a question of control: who decided when a painting was finished, and who decided whether the public saw it. On 15 April 1874, thirty-one artists answered by opening their own exhibition — organized as the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, hung with some two hundred works in the photographer Nadar's former studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines, outside the Salon and its jury entirely.

What hung there had no single look. Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a thinly and rapidly worked harbor view, shared the rooms with Berthe Morisot's The Cradle — a mother watching her sleeping child through a veil of muslin — and with Paul Cézanne's A Modern Olympia, which the Orsay records was scorned by public and critics alike. The critic Louis Leroy fixed on Monet's title in a review headed 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists': 'Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.' The insult became a name, and the Met records that some of the group later adopted it themselves.

Independence, not doctrine, was the common ground. The membership shifted with every show — eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, with anywhere from nine to thirty artists taking part. Camille Pissarro was the only painter in all eight; Berthe Morisot showed in seven. Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, and Gustave Caillebotte all passed through the roster.

1862–1873

Before the name

The alliance was assembled long before it was named. In 1862 Frédéric Bazille enrolled in the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre's Paris studio, where he met Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley — the student generation the Orsay calls 'the youth of Impressionism.' By 1867, the Met records, Bazille was already discussing an independent exhibition. In the summer of 1869 Monet and Renoir set their easels side by side at La Grenouillère, the bathing spot on the Seine, and painted the same view in the broken touch that became the movement's signature.

The war scattered them. Bazille enlisted in August 1870 and was killed in his first action that November, at twenty-eight; Monet waited out the Franco-Prussian War in London. When the survivors formed their société in 1873, the founder who had first argued for independence was four years dead. Not a single Bazille hung at the exhibition his friends opened in 1874.

No single Impressionist eye

The technique the name evokes is real: short, broken brushstrokes that barely describe form, pure unblended color set side by side, light itself as the subject, and modern life — boulevards, cafés, railway stations, suburban rivers, people at leisure — as the material. Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette is that manner at full stretch: a Sunday dance on the Butte Montmartre, sunlight breaking across straw hats and jackets in patches the Salon read as unfinished.

But the exhibitions never enforced one eye. Gustave Caillebotte painted Haussmann's rebuilt Paris with drawn, plotted precision — his Floor Scrapers, rejected by the Salon jury in 1875, hung at the group's second exhibition in 1876, and Paris Street; Rainy Day anchored the third. Edgar Degas built his theaters and café interiors as deliberately as Caillebotte built intersections. What united them with Monet's weather was the refusal to let a jury define finish, not a shared brushstroke.

The early shows were met with mockery as often as praise, and the movement's market was built largely outside official channels — by dealers rather than juries, above all Paul Durand-Ruel, who backed the group for decades.

Who could move through modern Paris

The modern city was not equally open to everyone who painted it. Berthe Morisot — the first woman to exhibit with the group, at the first show — and Mary Cassatt worked from the spaces where bourgeois women could actually stand: the nursery, the garden, the theater box. The subjects were not a retreat from modern life but a report on its terms.

Cassatt joined at the fourth exhibition in 1879, invited by Edgar Degas, and made the act of looking her material — the women in her theater pictures are spectators, not spectacle. Her own account of the group, quoted by the National Gallery of Art, states the movement's premise flat: 'At last I could work with absolute independence without considering the opinion of a jury.' Degas collaborated closely enough that, by her account, he painted part of Little Girl in a Blue Armchair himself.

Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877

The city as weather

No subject stated the program better than the railway station. In 1877 Claude Monet set up his easel inside the Gare Saint-Lazare — the terminus that had brought him in from Argenteuil for years — and painted the train shed as a landscape: steam against glass, iron ribs, a locomotive dissolving into blue vapor. The Art Institute of Chicago's Arrival of the Normandy Train belongs to that group.

The station pictures also announced the habit that would organize the rest of Monet's career: painting one motif again and again as the light changed, until the series — not the single canvas — became the work. The line from the Saint-Lazare canvases of 1877 to the Water Lilies rooms runs surprisingly straight.

The dealer replaces the jury

Escaping the Salon solved one problem and created another: independence needed an economy. The group's second exhibition, in 1876, was held in Paul Durand-Ruel's own gallery — the dealer's rooms standing in for the state's. Gustave Caillebotte, the wealthiest of the painters, worked the other side of the same problem; the National Gallery of Art describes him as the vital organizer who helped curate and finance the exhibitions.

The system they improvised — dealer, collector, independent show — outlived the group and became the standard machinery of the avant-gardes that followed. It also carried the pictures abroad: Durand-Ruel showed the Impressionists in New York in 1886, the same year the Paris exhibitions ended.

1886: the show that contained its successor

The eighth exhibition opened on 15 May 1886 at the Maison Dorée, 1 rue Laffitte, and closed the series. Pissarro had brought in Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — hung as catalogue number 175 — replaced the passing glance with a system: divided color, plotted figures, a method where the founders had offered a temperament. Gauguin was already pointing elsewhere.

The group dissolved into the movements it had made possible. Its members went their own ways — none longer than Monet, who outlived the movement by four decades — but the method of independence proved more durable than the membership.

From rebellion to heritage

The state came around slowly, and partly by force. When Gustave Caillebotte died in 1894 he left the nation his collection of his friends' work — more than seventy pictures, by the National Gallery of Art's count — and the bequest, accepted through Renoir's mediation, entered the Musée du Luxembourg in 1896: contested official recognition for painters the official system had refused.

The long coda belongs to Monet. The Water Lilies cycle he gave France after the 1918 Armistice fills two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie, installed to his design in 1927. Dismissed at first, the rooms were revalued after the Second World War: the painter André Masson called them 'the Sixtine Chapel of Impressionism' in 1952, and the Museum of Modern Art's 1955 purchase of a late panel sealed the reappraisal, with critics tracing a line from the late Monet to the abstraction of Pollock and Rothko.