The Paris AtlasCharting the artists, works, and places worth returning to.

Art movement · Paris · 1874–1886

Impressionism

A shifting alliance of painters who seized control of how, where, and by whom modern painting would be seen.

An orange sun over a hazy blue-grey harbor, small boats in the foreground, painted in loose broken strokes
Artwork reproductionClaude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet) — the canvas whose title became the movement's name.

Boulevard des Capucines, 1874

The exhibition that named it

A mother in dark blue watching her sleeping infant through a veil of white muslin
Artwork reproductionBerthe Morisot, The Cradle, 1872 (Musée d'Orsay) — no. 104 at the first exhibition, where Morisot became the first woman to show with the group.

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.[1]

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.[2]

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.[1]

1862–1873

Before the name

A portable painter's kit, metal paint tubes, easel, and fresh canvas sit beside a railway cutting under changing clouds
Editorial illustrationPortable materials, new rail routes, and shared work outdoors made rapid attention to weather and light practical before the movement had a 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.[3]

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.[3]

No single Impressionist eye

A crowded open-air dance in dappled sunlight, couples under the trees and a group at a table in the foreground
Artwork reproductionPierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876 (Musée d'Orsay) — the broken-light manner at full stretch.

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.[4]

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.[5]

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.[6]

One Paris garden appears through four connected approaches using broken light, firm drawing, atmospheric marks, and cropped observation
Editorial illustrationThe alliance held multiple eyes: independence from the jury mattered more than agreement on one brushstroke or way of seeing.

Who could move through modern Paris

Two young women in a theater box, one holding a fan and a bouquet, gilded balconies curving behind them
Artwork reproductionMary Cassatt, The Loge, c. 1878–1880 (National Gallery of Art) — the spectator as subject.

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.[7]

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.[8]

A Paris boulevard, café, theater, and domestic window form connected but unequal spaces for women and men observing modern life
Editorial illustrationModern Paris offered different fields of movement and observation; where an artist could stand helped determine what entered the picture.

Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877

The city as weather

A locomotive under the glass-and-iron shed of the Gare Saint-Lazare, dissolving into blue steam and light
Artwork reproductionClaude Monet, Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare, 1877 (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0).

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.[9]

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.[6]

The dealer replaces the jury

Collectors examine new paintings in a private Paris gallery while a dealer handles blank correspondence at his desk
Editorial illustrationThe private gallery, dealer's correspondence, and collector replaced the Salon jury with a market the artists could use — and still had to survive.

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.[6]

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.[6]

1886: the show that contained its successor

Strollers and seated figures in a riverside park, built entirely from small dots of color, within a painted border
Artwork reproductionGeorges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (Art Institute of Chicago) — no. 175 at the final exhibition.

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.[10]

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.[6]

Visitors move from loosely brushed pictures toward a precise dotted riverside canvas as the gallery floor changes from strokes into points
Editorial illustrationThe final exhibition contained its successor: the passing impression met a plotted system of divided color in the same rooms.

From rebellion to heritage

A very wide Water Lilies composition, the pond surface dissolving into violet and green with a low orange sun at the left
Artwork reproductionClaude Monet, The Water Lilies: Setting Sun (Musée de l'Orangerie) — the movement's four-decade coda.

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.[11]

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.[12]

Major Works of Impressionism

Paintings and objects from the movement, each with the collection that holds it today. Pictures appear where the rights allow.

A woman in a black-and-white striped dress with black fur trim sits at the front of a theatre box, facing the viewer. Pink roses are pinned at her bodice and in her hair, several strands of pearls sit at her throat and a drop earring hangs at each ear. Her gloved hands rest on the ledge of the theatre box, one wearing a gold bracelet, the other holding lowered black opera glasses. Behind and above her a man in black evening dress and a white shirt front holds opera glasses to his eyes in a pale glove, and the glasses tilt upward, away from the stage

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

La Loge (The Theatre Box)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1874 · Oil on canvas

Collection: The Courtauld, London

A woman in a black-and-white striped dress sits at the front of a theatre box and looks out of the picture, her opera glasses lowered into her lap. Behind her a man in evening dress raises his own glasses and points them above her head, into the upper tiers. Pierre-Auguste Renoir staged both figures in his studio and sent the result to the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874. The Courtauld, London. Image: public domain.

An orange and gold skiff crosses the lower half of the canvas on blue water, carrying two women. The nearer one, in a pale dress and a straw hat with dark trim, works an oar that runs down to the right into the water; the second sits facing her, bareheaded, in pink and cream. Beyond them a sailboat with a white triangular sail and a red-orange hull lies near a low green boat, and the far bank carries a pale villa with a slate roof, a white fence and small dark figures. A railway bridge with diagonal cross-bracing crosses the right side, with a line of thick white steam dabs above the trees, and a clump of green reeds rises from the water at the lower left

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

The Skiff (La Yole)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1875 · Oil on canvas

Collection: The National Gallery, London

An orange skiff crosses the lower half of the canvas on blue water, with two women aboard and a railway bridge behind. Pierre-Auguste Renoir built the picture out of bright unmixed paint, using no black and no earth colours at all. The National Gallery in London bought it in 1982 and numbers it NG6478.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Skiff (La Yole), 1875. The National Gallery, London. Image: public domain.

Dancing couples under trees, with people seated at a table and pale sunlight across their clothes

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

Bal du moulin de la Galette

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1876 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette shows dancers and friends at an outdoor dance garden in Montmartre. Patches of sunlight break across faces, clothing, and the crowded ground.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Image: public domain.

Friends at a table under a striped awning, a woman holding a dog at left and a seated man in a straw hat at right

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

Luncheon of the Boating Party

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1880–1881 · Oil on canvas

Collection: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir gathers friends on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise at Chatou, beside the Seine. Aline Charigot holds a dog at the left, while Gustave Caillebotte sits backward in a chair at the right.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.. Image: public domain.

A crowd on a Parisian street beneath a canopy of overlapping slate blue-grey umbrellas. At the far left a bareheaded young woman in a grey-blue jacket and skirt looks out at the viewer, a large open bandbox on her left arm and her bare hand on its rim. Behind her a man in a dark bowler hat grips a red-brown umbrella handle in a dark glove. At the centre a woman in a blue and green bonnet and fur-trimmed cape looks down, a round posy pinned at her chest. At the right a small girl in a navy coat with speckled lace trim and a plumed bonnet holds a wooden hoop and stick in both hands, with an older girl in a cream lace bonnet behind her. A tree and a grey apartment block show above the umbrellas

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

The Umbrellas

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · About 1881–1886 · Oil on canvas

Collection: The National Gallery, London

A crowd fills a Parisian street under a canopy of at least a dozen umbrellas, with six principal figures close to the front. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted it in two stages separated by around four years, and the right half and the left half are in visibly different styles. The National Gallery in London holds it as NG3268 through the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Umbrellas, About 1881–1886. The National Gallery, London. Image: public domain.

A stretch of the Seine at Les Andelys painted in small separate touches of colour. Village houses with cream stucco walls, a red brick front and orange-red tiled roofs line the left bank, and above them a green chalk hill carries the broken stone keep of Château Gaillard. A man in a blue smock sits on a moored boat with a broad salmon-coloured roof. Poplars on the far right bank throw blue and gold reflections into the water, and a pale boat and a round orange float sit at the lower right

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Neo-Impressionism

Les Andelys. The Riverbank

Paul Signac · 1886 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Musée d'Orsay · Paris, France

Displays rotate at the Musée d'Orsay. Check the museum's object record before travelling specifically to see it.

The Seine runs across the lower half of the canvas at Les Andelys in Normandy, with the village houses along the left bank and the ruined keep of Château Gaillard on the chalk hill behind. Paul Signac spent the summer of 1886 there and brought back ten canvases. He kept the painting in his own studio until he died, and the Musée d'Orsay acquired it in 1996.

Paul Signac, Les Andelys. The Riverbank, 1886. Musée d'Orsay. Image: public domain.

A Paris boulevard under snow, with long curving wheel ruts crossing the pale foreground in strings of gold and blue dots. Bare plane trees run up the middle of the road, and a horse omnibus with a snow-covered roof stands among them. A man in a blue overcoat and bowler hat walks toward the viewer at the left of centre, with figures under umbrellas behind him. At the right a red-brick and ochre corner building carries a red and blue hanging flag and a tall black cast-iron lamp standard whose glass lantern is capped with thick white snow

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Neo-Impressionism

Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris

Paul Signac · 1886 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Minneapolis Institute of Art · Minneapolis, United States

The museum's record gives Gallery G359. Displays rotate, so check the collection page before travelling to see it.

Snow lies across the boulevard de Clichy in the north of Paris, cut by the curving ruts of cab and omnibus wheels. Bare plane trees run up the centre, a horse omnibus stands in the middle distance, and a red-brick corner building with a gas lamp closes the right side. Paul Signac painted it in 1886, the year Neo-Impressionism got its name. The painting is at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Paul Signac, Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1886. Minneapolis Institute of Art. Image: public domain.

A circus ring seen from above, most of it empty pale floor. At the right a gray horse with dark spots on its rump canters with its head bent low. A young woman with orange hair sits sideways on its back in a pale green bodice and a flaring gauze skirt, looking back over her shoulder. At the left the ringmaster in a dark striped tailcoat and high white collar holds a long whip whose lash trails across the floor. A clown in green runs off the left edge, and a performer in striped stockings stands on a red pedestal at the top. Spectators in evening dress watch from behind a curving red barrier with red and white benches

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Post-Impressionism in Montmartre

Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1887–88 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago · Chicago, United States

The Art Institute of Chicago's record listed the painting as on view in Gallery 242 in September 2026. Gallery displays change, so check the museum's page before a special visit.

A bareback rider in a gauze skirt sits sideways on a gray horse that is gathering speed, while the ringmaster, Monsieur Loyal, urges it on with his whip. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted it in 1887–88, and it is set at the Cirque Fernando in Montmartre. Joseph Oller bought it for the Moulin Rouge, where it hung near the entrance. It is now at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1925.523.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Equestrienne (At the Cirque Fernando), 1887–88. Art Institute of Chicago. Image: public domain.

Pen-and-ink illustration of a pianist at a grand piano before a moonlit Paris window, with a muted blue brush stroke.

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Musical Impressionism and Symbolism

Clair de lune

Claude Debussy · c. 1890; revised and published 1905 · Solo piano · third movement of Suite bergamasque

Debussy’s most famous piano piece turns moonlight into an experience of suspended rhythm, changing register, resonance and return rather than a literal musical picture.

Claude Debussy, Clair de lune, c. 1890; revised and published 1905.

Pen-and-ink illustration of a pianist at an upright piano before a garden and cloud-filled window, with a pale lavender-blue brush stroke.

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Early Debussy and Musical Impressionism

Rêverie

Claude Debussy · 1890 · Solo piano piece

An early piano piece whose singing melody and gently circulating accompaniment made it one of Debussy’s most approachable works while anticipating his mature interest in resonance and suspended time.

Claude Debussy, Rêverie, 1890.

Pen-and-ink illustration of masked dancers and musicians in a moonlit garden, with dusty-rose and moon-blue brush strokes.

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Musical Impressionism and Symbolism

Suite bergamasque

Claude Debussy · c. 1890; revised and published 1905 · Four-movement suite for solo piano

A four-movement piano suite in which Debussy looks back to dances and courtly elegance while quietly remaking harmony, rhythm and atmosphere for the twentieth century.

Claude Debussy, Suite bergamasque, c. 1890; revised and published 1905.

A man in strict profile facing right, in a gold-ochre suit and long dark coat. The man holds a black top hat and a pale cane in one hand and offers a white flower with swept-back petals and a crimson throat in the other. Behind him a pinwheel of coloured bands in orange, pale blue, red, lemon, magenta, violet and green spins out from a point past his fingers. A yellow scrolling pattern fills the upper left and a deep blue field of gold stars runs down the right. The whole surface is built from small, even, round dots of colour

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Neo-Impressionism

Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890

Paul Signac · 1890 · Oil on canvas

Collection: The Museum of Modern Art · New York, United States

The museum's record gives floor 5, gallery 501. Displays rotate, so check the collection page before travelling to see it.

Félix Fénéon stands in profile facing right, in a gold-ochre suit, holding a top hat and cane in one hand and a white flower in the other. Behind him a pinwheel of coloured bands spins out from a point just past his fingers. The critic who named Neo-Impressionism is set against a diagram of the theory he named. The Museum of Modern Art holds it as object number 85.1991.

Paul Signac, Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890, 1890. The Museum of Modern Art. Image: public domain.

A crowded nightclub interior seen at a steep angle. Five people sit around a table in the middle distance, three of the men in top hats. A woman with red hair and a brown feather boa has her back to the viewer. At the right edge a woman's face is lit from below in harsh green. In the background two women stand before a mirror, one arranging her hair. A pale wooden balustrade cuts diagonally across the lower left corner.

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Post-Impressionism in Montmartre

At the Moulin Rouge

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · 1892–95 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted the customers and performers of the Moulin Rouge as a group portrait of people he knew by name, including himself. It is at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Moulin Rouge, 1892–95. Art Institute of Chicago. Image: public domain.

Pen-and-ink nocturnal seascape uniting clouds, a procession of lights and a women's chorus on the shore beneath a deep violet-blue sky

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Symbolism and musical Impressionism

Nocturnes

Claude Debussy · 1897–1899; premiered 1900–1901 · Three nocturnes for orchestra; women’s chorus in Sirènes

Three orchestral studies in changing perception: clouds crossing an unmoving sky, the pulse and procession of a festival, and moonlit sea heard through a wordless women’s chorus.

Claude Debussy, Nocturnes, 1897–1899; premiered 1900–1901.

Pen-and-ink illustration of a conductor and orchestral instruments swept into engraved ocean waves with a deep-blue brush stroke.

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Modernism, Musical Impressionism and Symbolism

La Mer

Claude Debussy · 1903–1905; premiered 15 October 1905 · Three symphonic sketches for orchestra

Debussy’s three symphonic sketches turn the sea into an orchestral study of emergence, motion, light, force and instability rather than a literal sequence of painted waves.

Claude Debussy, La Mer, 1903–1905; premiered 15 October 1905.

Pen-and-ink illustration of a child at a piano with a toy elephant and doll, set against a muted coral brush stroke.

Editorial illustration

Music composition · Musical Impressionism and modernism

Children’s Corner

Claude Debussy · 1906–1908 · Six-movement suite for solo piano

A witty and affectionate six-piece piano suite dedicated to Debussy’s daughter Chouchou, where lessons, toys, stories and popular entertainment become sophisticated musical character studies.

Claude Debussy, Children’s Corner, 1906–1908.

The Palace of the Popes at Avignon seen across the Rhône in evening light, painted in broad rectangular blocks of colour. Salmon-pink and orange tiles build the sunlit towers and battlements, cobalt blue tiles build the shaded walls, and a darker tower in blue and violet stands at the left with one lit cream and orange opening. A band of blue-green foliage runs below the palace, and the single arch of the Pont Saint-Bénézet crosses the lower left in blue and mauve with red along its crown. The river fills the bottom third in rows of blue, rose, lilac and emerald blocks, and the sky is green and lemon at the upper left turning pink across the top

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Neo-Impressionism

Avignon. Evening (the Palace of the Popes)

Paul Signac · 1909 · Oil on canvas

Collection: Musée d'Orsay · Paris, France

Displays rotate at the Musée d'Orsay. Check the museum's object record before travelling specifically to see it.

The Palace of the Popes rises above the Rhône at Avignon in evening light, with the broken arches of the Pont Saint-Bénézet crossing the water at the left. Paul Signac painted it in 1909 in blocks of colour several times the width of his earlier dots. The French state bought it from him at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants in 1912, and it is now at the Musée d'Orsay.

Paul Signac, Avignon. Evening (the Palace of the Popes), 1909. Musée d'Orsay. Image: public domain.

One panoramic panel from Claude Monet's Water Lilies cycle at the Musée de l'Orangerie, with lily pads floating among violet, green, and gold reflections

Artwork reproduction

Painting · Impressionism

The Water Lilies

Claude Monet · Painted c. 1914–1926; installed 1927 · Oil on canvas, in eight compositions

Eight enormous curved paintings of Monet's lily pond at Giverny, hung in two oval rooms built to hold them at the Musée de l'Orangerie. Monet gave them to France the day after the Armistice of 11 November 1918, worked on them until he died, and never saw them installed. The rooms opened in May 1927, and the eight panels have been there ever since.

Claude Monet, The Water Lilies, Painted c. 1914–1926; installed 1927. Image: public domain.

Impressionism connections

Organizations and publications

Museum

Musée de l'Orangerie

Timeline

  1. 1862

    Frédéric Bazille meets Monet, Renoir, and Sisley in Charles Gleyre's Paris studio — the movement's student generation.

  2. 1869

    Monet and Renoir paint side by side at La Grenouillère on the Seine, working out the broken touch in tandem.

  3. 1870–1873

    Bazille is killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight; Monet waits out the war in London. The Société anonyme forms in 1873.

  4. 1874

    Thirty-one artists open the first independent exhibition at 35 boulevard des Capucines on 15 April; Louis Leroy's mockery of Impression, Sunrise names the movement.

    Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet). Shown at the first independent exhibition in 1874, its title gave the movement its name. (Claude Monet (Musée Marmottan Monet), via Wikimedia Commons)

  5. 1876

    The second exhibition is held in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery; Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers, rejected by the 1875 Salon jury, hangs there instead.

  6. 1877

    The third exhibition, at 6 rue Le Peletier, shows Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day; the exhibition press bills the group as 'Impressionists.'

    Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877 (Art Institute of Chicago) — Haussmann's new Paris at full scale, shown at the third exhibition in 1877. (Gustave Caillebotte (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0), via the museum's open-access program)

  7. 1879

    Mary Cassatt joins at the fourth exhibition, invited by Degas — 'At last I could work with absolute independence.'

    Mary Cassatt, The Loge, c. 1878–1880 (National Gallery of Art) — the female spectator painted from inside the box, looking rather than looked at. (Mary Cassatt (National Gallery of Art), via Wikimedia Commons)

  8. 1886

    The eighth and last exhibition opens at the Maison Dorée, 1 rue Laffitte; Seurat's Grande Jatte announces the successor generation. Durand-Ruel shows the group in New York the same year.

    Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (Art Institute of Chicago) — catalogue no. 175 at the eighth and final exhibition, 1886. (Georges Seurat (Art Institute of Chicago, CC0), via the museum's open-access program)

  9. 1894–1896

    Caillebotte dies and leaves the state more than seventy Impressionist pictures; the bequest enters the Musée du Luxembourg in 1896.

  10. 1918

    The day after the Armistice, Monet offers Water Lilies panels to France through Clemenceau.

  11. 1927

    The Water Lilies rooms open at the Orangerie, months after Monet's death.

    Claude Monet, The Water Lilies: Setting Sun, one of the eight compositions in the Orangerie's two oval rooms. (Claude Monet (Musée de l'Orangerie), via Wikimedia Commons)

  12. 1952–1955

    André Masson calls the Orangerie rooms 'the Sixtine Chapel of Impressionism'; MoMA buys a late panel, and the revaluation of late Monet begins.

Impressionism: frequently asked questions

What is Impressionism?

A movement of painters who exhibited independently of the Paris Salon between 1874 and 1886, painting modern subjects in short, broken strokes of pure color with light itself as the real subject. The group had no doctrine; independence from the official jury was the common ground.

Why is it called Impressionism?

From a hostile review. At the group's first exhibition in 1874, the critic Louis Leroy attacked Monet's Impression, Sunrise in a piece titled 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists' — 'Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.' The insult stuck, and some of the painters later adopted the name themselves.

Who were the main Impressionist painters?

Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Gustave Caillebotte, with Cézanne and Gauguin showing in some exhibitions. Membership shifted constantly; Pissarro was the only painter in all eight shows.

Was Manet an Impressionist?

He never exhibited with them. The Met records that Manet declined invitations to the first show and all seven that followed, preferring the Salon — yet he was the group's admired elder, painted beside Monet, and was tied to it by family: Berthe Morisot married his brother Eugène.

Who were the women of Impressionism?

Berthe Morisot was the first woman to exhibit with the group, at the first show in 1874, and appeared in seven of the eight exhibitions. Mary Cassatt joined at the fourth in 1879 at Degas's invitation. Both painted modern life from the spaces open to bourgeois women — interiors, gardens, theater boxes — and made that vantage the subject.

Why did the group break apart?

Independence outlasted agreement. The roster shifted with every show, and by the eighth exhibition in 1886 Pissarro had brought in Seurat and Signac, whose systematic divided color pointed to a new generation. The movement dissolved into its successors, but the independent-exhibition model survived them all.

What is the difference between Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism?

Neo-Impressionism arrived inside Impressionism's last exhibition: Seurat and Signac, introduced by Pissarro in 1886, replaced the intuitive broken stroke with systematically divided color — the pointillism of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Where the founders painted a passing perception, the Neo-Impressionists built one by method.

What makes a painting Impressionist art?

Mostly how and where it was made. Tate defines Impressionism as based on painting out of doors and spontaneously on the spot, rather than in a studio from sketches. Because the painters worked quickly in front of the subject to catch light that was changing as they watched, the brushwork became rapid and broken into separate dabs, and working outside made them far more alert to colour and to the shifting pattern of a natural scene. The usual subjects are landscapes and scenes of everyday life.

Where can you see Impressionism in Paris?

The Musée d'Orsay holds the broad collection, including Morisot's The Cradle, Cézanne's A Modern Olympia, and Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers. The Musée de l'Orangerie holds Monet's Water Lilies rooms and the Walter-Guillaume collection, and the Musée Marmottan Monet holds Impression, Sunrise itself.

References

References

The sources below include histories, manifestos, scholarly research, and primary materials that informed this page. They document Impressionism, its development, and the artists and works associated with it.

  1. 1abParis 1874: Inventing Impressionism — Musée d'Orsay

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    Musée d'Orsay
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  2. 2↑1874: The Birth of Impressionism

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    National Gallery of Art, Washington
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  3. 3abFrédéric Bazille (1841–1870): The Youth of Impressionism — Musée d'Orsay

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  4. 4↑What Is Impressionism? 4 Things to Know — National Gallery of Art

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    National Gallery of Art, Washington
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  5. 5↑Raboteurs de parquets (Gustave Caillebotte) — Musée d'Orsay

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  6. 6abcdeImpressionism: Art and Modernity — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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    The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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  7. 7↑Le Berceau (Berthe Morisot) — Musée d'Orsay

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  8. 8↑Mary Cassatt Brings Girls and Women to the Museum — National Gallery of Art

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    National Gallery of Art, Washington
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  9. 9↑Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare — Art Institute of Chicago

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    Art Institute of Chicago
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  1. 10↑A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 (Georges Seurat) — Art Institute of Chicago

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  2. 11↑Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter's Eye — National Gallery of Art

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    National Gallery of Art, Washington
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  3. 12↑History of the Water Lilies cycle — Musée de l'Orangerie

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    Musée de l'Orangerie
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    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Impressionism page.

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  4. 13Impressionism (art term)

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    Tate
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  5. 14La Grenouillère (Claude Monet) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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    The Metropolitan Museum of Art
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  6. 15Édouard Manet (1832–1883) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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  7. 16Une moderne Olympia (Paul Cézanne) — Musée d'Orsay

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  8. 17Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (Mary Cassatt) — National Gallery of Art

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    National Gallery of Art, Washington
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  9. 18Paris Street; Rainy Day (Gustave Caillebotte) — Art Institute of Chicago

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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this movement's history and interpretation. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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