The Impressionist Movement (1862-1886)
Impressionism was a movement of Paris-based painters who abandoned the finished surface and historical subject matter of academic art to record modern life, light, and colour in visible brushstrokes and open-air painting. Barred from the official Salon and mocked by critics, the group organized eight independent exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, financing and running them themselves. The story traces the movement from its studio origins and the Salon des Refusés to the final exhibition where its own innovations passed to the next generation.
Events
The Studio of Charles Gleyre and the Plein-Air Circle
In 1862 Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille met in the Paris studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre and began painting landscape out of doors, following the example of Eugène Boudin, Johan Barthold Jongkind, and the Barbizon school. Working from unblended colour and rapid strokes to catch changing light, they treated ordinary scenes, railway stations, and suburban leisure as subjects fit for art. The circle absorbed the atmospheric freedom of Turner and Delacroix while rejecting the finished, posed conventions of the Salon.
Location: Paris, France
The Salon des Refusés
After the 1863 Salon jury rejected an unprecedented number of works, including Édouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Napoleon III decreed that the refused paintings be shown to the public in the Salon des Refusés. Many visitors came to laugh, but the exhibition drew larger crowds than the official Salon and announced the existence of a new current in French painting. Petitions for another Salon des Refusés in 1867 and 1872 were refused, pushing the young artists toward independent exhibition.
Location: Paris, France
The Franco-Prussian War Scatters the Group
The Franco-Prussian War broke up the circle in 1870: Frédéric Bazille was killed in action that November, Camille Pissarro lost a large body of work when troops destroyed his paintings at Louveciennes, and Monet and Pissarro spent the war years in London. There they encountered the works of Turner and Constable and the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who began buying their pictures. The defeat of France and the Paris Commune formed the political backdrop against which the group reassembled.
Location: France
Monet Paints Impression, Sunrise
In 1872 Claude Monet painted the harbour of Le Havre at dawn as a haze of loose strokes and an orange sun reflected on the water, a work he titled Impression, Sunrise. The painting compressed a whole scene into a single visual impression, prioritizing the sensation of light over the description of objects. Exhibited two years later, it would give the movement its name.
Location: Le Havre, France
Founding of the Société Anonyme des Artistes
In December 1873 Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, and their allies formed the Société Anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs etc., a cooperative registered to mount its own exhibitions with no jury, no awards, and shared proceeds. Its constitution rejected the Salon system entirely, letting the public judge the work. The first exhibition was planned for the following spring outside the official circuit.
Location: Paris, France
The First Impressionist Exhibition
On 15 April 1874 the group opened its first exhibition in the vacated studio of the photographer Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines, showing the work of thirty artists, including Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Morisot, and Cézanne. The older painter Eugène Boudin joined as an honoured guest, while Manet, whom the group greatly admired, declined to take part and continued to submit to the Salon. Critical response was mixed and hostile; Monet and Cézanne drew the harshest attacks, and sales were few.
Location: Paris, France
A Critic Names the Movement
Later in April 1874 the critic and humorist Louis Leroy published "The Exhibition of the Impressionists" in the newspaper Le Charivari, a satirical dialogue mocking the show as unfinished sketches. Taking the word from Monet's Impression, Sunrise, he used "Impressionist" derisively, and the label stuck first with the public and then with the artists themselves. The review turned an insult into the name of the movement.
Location: Paris, France
The Middle Exhibitions and the Name Adopted
By the second and third exhibitions of 1876 and 1877 the group had adopted "Impressionist" as its own banner: the 1877 show was billed as the Exposition des Impressionnistes. Renoir's Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and Monet's station and river scenes defined the style's subjects, modern life and light, and the poet Stéphane Mallarmé publicly defended the new vision of a subject "palpitating with movement, light, and life". Financially the exhibitions returned little, and the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel remained the group's chief buyer.
Location: Paris, France
Fractures: Degas, Cassatt, and the Selective Seventh Show
The cooperative was never doctrinaire and soon divided: Edgar Degas insisted on the primacy of drawing, distrusted open-air painting, and pressed for the inclusion of artists such as Jean-François Raffaëlli over Monet's objections, while inviting Mary Cassatt to exhibit in 1879. Renoir returned to the Salon and won success there in 1879, and Cézanne and Monet also skipped group shows at times. The seventh exhibition of 1882, restricted to nine longstanding members including Caillebotte and Morisot, was the most selective of the eight.
Location: Paris, France
The Eighth Exhibition and the Neo-Impressionist Turn
The eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886 included Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, a monumental canvas of scientifically divided colour that opened the next chapter of French painting. Camille Pissarro, who had pushed for Seurat's inclusion, was the only artist to exhibit in all eight shows. The group dissolved as a exhibiting body, but its methods had entered the mainstream: by the early 1890s diluted Impressionism was common in Salon art, and its legacy ran through Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.
Location: Paris, France