French Impressionists
The term ‘Impressionism’ is associated with a group of French artists working in and around Paris from the 1860s onwards, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas.
These artists wanted to paint nature in an immediate and contemporary way. Rather than painting heroic scenes from classical mythology or biblical history, they were dedicated to the modern landscape and scenes of contemporary urban reality.
Crucially, rather than mixing their paints on the palette, the Impressionists developed a systematic technique, applying short brushstrokes of pure, unmixed colour directly onto the canvas.
The work that inadvertently gave its name to the movement was Monet’s Impression – Sunrise (1872). The critic Jules Castagnary wrote of Monet and his contemporaries: ‘If one wants to characterise them with one word that will explain them, it will be necessary to forge the new term of Impressionists.’
