The impressionism movement took shape in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s. Its painters left the studio for the open air, worked fast with bright colour and visible brushstrokes, and chose modern life as their subject: cafés, boulevards, river banks and dance halls. The name began as an insult, and the painters ended up using it.
So what is impressionism in one line? It is a group of Paris painters who tried to record how light and colour looked at one moment, rather than producing a polished studio scene. This article covers where the movement started, how the first group show worked, why the name stuck, how Japanese prints shaped it and what came next. It also belongs to our 19th-century art and culture series.
What is impressionism? The short answer
Impressionism is less a formal style than a loose circle of painters, centred on Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley. They shared working habits: painting outdoors when possible, keeping colours bright and letting the brushwork show. They also chose ordinary modern subjects over the classical and historical scenes that the official art world still rewarded.
Their public identity came mostly from their exhibitions. Between 1874 and 1886 the group staged eight shows in Paris, each with a different mix of artists.
Where it began: the Salon and the 1863 rejections
In the 1860s a painter’s reputation depended largely on whether a jury accepted a work for the annual Salon. In 1863 the jury rejected Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a picnic scene with a nude woman seated among clothed men. Napoleon III then ordered a second show of the rejected works, the Salon des Refusés, which opened in Paris on 15 May 1863. Of more than 5,000 paintings submitted that year, about 2,200 were refused.
Manet showed his picnic painting there under the title Le Bain, and it drew both laughter and outrage. He never exhibited with the group that became the Impressionists, but younger painters saw in his flat light and modern subjects a model worth following. Several of them had met in the early 1860s in the studio of the Swiss-born teacher Charles Gleyre, where Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Frédéric Bazille were students, and they began painting outdoors together.
The outdoor habit had earlier roots in the Barbizon painters, who worked around the Fontainebleau forest; see our article on Millet and the Barbizon School. Romanticism, the movement before them, favoured emotion and drama, and What Is Romanticism? explains that background.
Paris as the subject
The city they painted was changing fast. Wide boulevards and new parks were reshaping its streets, and the 1876 plan below divides Paris into twenty arrondissements. Renoir’s dance hall stood on the hill of Montmartre in the north, while the first group show was held on the boulevard des Capucines in the centre. The map makes clear that these were two different parts of one city.
War, exile and a new artists’ society
In July 1870 France went to war with Prussia. Paris was under siege by the autumn, and several painters left France. Monet reached London in mid-September 1870, and Pissarro joined relatives in south London in December. Pissarro’s house at Louveciennes, west of Paris, had been used as stables by Prussian troops. In London Monet painted only about six views of the parks and the Thames, but he also met fellow exiles, including the painter James Tissot.
In December 1873 the painters set up a co-operative society of artists so that they could show their work without the official jury. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Morisot and Degas were among its members. The society led directly to the first group exhibition in 1874.
The first group show, 1874
The first exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 on the upper floor of 35 boulevard des Capucines, the former studio of the photographer Nadar, and ran until 15 May. About 30 artists took part, with roughly 165 works; some counts are higher, so treat that figure as an estimate. Press reaction was mixed, and the most famous review was openly mocking.
Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle (1872), which shows her sister Edma watching a sleeping baby, was among the works. Critics received it kindly, but it did not sell.
The name that came from a joke
On 25 April 1874 the critic Louis Leroy published a satirical piece in Le Charivari, a Paris humour paper. He wrote it as a mocking conversation and used the title of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise to make fun of the whole group. Calling the painters “impressionists” was meant as an insult, a suggestion that they had recorded a passing impression rather than finished a picture.
The joke outlived its author’s intention. The label stuck, and within a few years the painters themselves were using it. Today it names a whole way of painting, not just one show, and the most famous example of that style carries the title that was used to mock it.
How they painted: light, colour and modern life
Impressionist painting rests on three habits. First, the artists often worked outdoors and tried to catch the light before it changed. Second, they avoided black and dark brown for shadows and used colour instead. Third, they treated ordinary subjects as worth serious attention: a boat on the water, a crowd at a dance hall, a street under floodwater.
The brushwork carries part of the message. Impressionists left strokes visible rather than blending them into a smooth surface. Up close the canvas can look rough, but from a distance the strokes gather into the shimmer of water, leaves or sky. Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), shown at the group’s 1877 exhibition, does this with dancers, friends and dappled sunlight. Photography, which was spreading at the same time, is often linked to the cropped, off-centre views in such paintings, but the painters worked in colour and brushwork, not in the camera’s grey tones.
Edgar Degas painted ballet pupils and their teacher in a rehearsal room of the old Paris Opéra, a scene dated 1874. Alfred Sisley’s The Flood at Port-Marly (1876) shows a street west of Paris under water, with a tavern standing in the flood beneath a grey sky. These paintings show present-day city and river life rather than historical episodes.
Several painters worked along the Seine west of Paris, in villages such as Argenteuil and Port-Marly, which is why a regional road map is useful for placing their scenes.
The approach lasted well beyond the 1870s. Camille Pissarro’s Boulevard Montmartre, Spring is dated 1897, more than twenty years after the first show. Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath is dated 1893. The style was not confined to a single moment.
Impressionism artists: Morisot and Cassatt
Berthe Morisot showed in seven of the eight group exhibitions, which made her one of the most consistent members. Her paintings often focus on women and children at home, and The Cradle is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Mary Cassatt was an American painter who worked in Paris. Degas brought her into the group, and she exhibited with the Impressionists from 1879. The Child’s Bath shows a mother holding a child over a basin, seen from above. Art historians often point to Japanese prints in its flattened space and asymmetric composition.
Japanese prints and Japonisme
From the mid-19th century, Japanese objects and prints reached Europe, and the French called the fashion for them Japonisme. A well-known starting point is the story of the printmaker Félix Bracquemond, who is said to have found a copy of the sketchbook Hokusai Manga around 1856 in his printer’s workshop. The story is told often, but its details come from later retellings, so treat it as tradition rather than documented fact.
What caught the painters’ eye was the look of ukiyo-e woodblock prints: flat areas of colour, firm outlines, bold cropping, figures cut off at the edge of the frame and high viewpoints. These offered a different way to build a picture from the Western tradition of a centred, deep stage.
Two examples help. Hiroshige’s Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (1857) shows a rain-soaked bridge and town in a bold, flat design. Monet’s La Japonaise (1876) shows his wife, Camille, in a Japanese kimono. Both show how closely French painters were engaging with Japanese art.
Eight shows and a changing group
Between 1874 and 1886 the group held eight exhibitions. Membership changed from show to show, and the organisers disagreed about whom to invite. Pissarro showed at all eight, according to standard accounts. Renoir’s dance scene appeared at the third show in 1877, and Cassatt joined from 1879.
The eighth and final show opened in May 1886. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who built images from small dots of colour, took part, and the group split over whether to invite them. Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was among the centrepieces, and it hung in a room that also held Pissarro’s Neo-Impressionist work.
After impressionism: Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism
Seurat’s method of building images from separate dots of colour is usually called Neo-Impressionism. It pursued the impressionist interest in light through a more systematic technique. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse went in other directions.
The term “Post-Impressionism” was popularised by the critic and painter Roger Fry. His 1910 London show Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Galleries, introduced Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse to British audiences. Who first used the word, and when, is still debated.
Why it matters and what exams ask
Impressionism mattered because it treated the painted moment as a valid subject. Its painters showed that a picture could be built from light, colour and brushwork, not only from careful drawing and a story. That shift opened the way to later modern painting.
History and art-history exams often ask about three things: the rejection of the official Salon and the 1863 Salon des Refusés; the choice of modern urban and leisure subjects; and the changes in colour and brushwork. Know the anchor dates too: 1863 for the refused works, 1874 for the first group show and 1886 for the last.
Read next
- Millet and the Barbizon School: the outdoor painters who came before the Impressionists.
- Famous Impressionist Paintings and Painters: a wider tour of the works and artists touched on here.
- What Is Romanticism?: the emotional, dramatic art of the generation before.
