Impressionism

Impressionism was based on light and the subject that was being painted or drawn. Instead of creating smoothly blended somber colors, the standards for French painting, the Impressionist placed separate touches of vibrantly contrasting colors directly onto the canvas without prior mixing on the palette. If you look closely at a small section of an Impressionist painting, you will see many individual brush strokes of varying colors, placed side by side with no blending – a jumble of color daubs. But when you move farther away, your eyes “mix” the colors to produce a recognizable subject with shimmering effects of light. The artist attempted to paint what the eye actually sees, rather than what the brain interprets from visual cues. For example, if you look at a hou

. . .
One artist, Claude Monet, painted the same haystack repeatedly, each time the sun changed direction, and so did the effect on his painting. The term Impressionism struck Leroy as an appropriate description of the loose, inexact manner of painting of Monet and several other painters. The Impressionist specialized in landscape, informal portraits in a domestic setting, and still life – genres that before the 1870’s had been regarded as of lesser importance than historical paintings.

Since light was the main influence in Impressionist work, artists started to find their subject matter outdoors rather than in a studio, so that they can observe nature more directly and capture it’s most fleeting aspects – especially the changing light of the sun. They were especially outraged of the

response that critics gave to fellow painter, Eduoard Manet.

At the time, artists who struggled to gain recognition submitted their works to the Salon, an annual government sponsored exhibition in Paris. Instead, Manet submitted his painting at a special exhibition of rejected painters called the Salon de Refuses. This would give their paintings different effects on the picture each time as the light changed. He provided the link between most of the artists who took part in the first impressionist exhibition and in turn he responded to the innovations of the Impressionists. Manet was made a hero to the younger generation of painters, who rallied around him. se in the distance and you know intellectually that the house is painted a uniform color of yellow, you might “see” all one shade of yellow, because your brain tells you that is correct. They soon accepted the fact that Impressionism was now what the artists were doing, and that artists no longer intended to create photo-imaged pictures. At the time, nudes were an acceptable subject in allegorical or historical paintings, but not in scenes of everyday life. The liveliness and spontaneity of their brushstrokes appeared unfinished to many viewers including the critic Leroy. They did not want to accept that painted photo images were no longer the thing artists were attracted to.

Common topics in this essay:
Impressionism Impressionism, Refuses Manet, Claude Monet, Le Dejeuner, , Sisley Pissaro, Instead Manet, Louis Leroy, Manet Manets, historical paintings,

Approximate Word count = 754
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Already a member? Click here