A short guide to Impressionism
How a group of painters in 1870s Paris changed what a painting could look like.
Impressionism began in France in the 1860s and 1870s. A group of painters, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt and Gustave Caillebotte, began to show their work outside the official Salon, which tended to reject paintings that did not follow its rules. Their first group exhibition was held in Paris in 1874.
The name
The name came from a critic who used it as a joke after seeing a Monet painting called Impression, Sunrise. The painters later adopted the word themselves. It describes a focus on the first impression of a scene, with light and atmosphere often more important than detail.
What they painted
Many Impressionists chose modern life as a subject: streets, cafés, theatres, gardens and leisure. You can see this in Caillebotte's rainy Paris junction, Degas's dancers resting during a lesson and Seurat's Sunday crowd by the Seine. Seurat is usually grouped with the Post-Impressionists, who built on the Impressionists' ideas.
How they painted
They often used small, visible strokes of bright colour, and they tended to paint outdoors, or at least start there, to catch changing light. Monet's series of haystacks shows the idea clearly: he painted the same subject at different times of day and in different seasons to show how light changed it. In Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), the shadows contain purple and orange, not just grey.
Not one style
The group was not uniform. Degas worked mainly indoors and cared about drawing and composition. Cassatt was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, as in The Child's Bath. Caillebotte used a more precise technique than most of the others. What they shared was the wish to paint contemporary life in a fresh way, and to show their work on their own terms.
Why it still matters
Impressionism changed how people thought about painting. It suggested that a picture did not have to hide the brushwork or finish every detail, and that colour could do the work that line did before. Later movements, from Post-Impressionism to abstraction, built on that idea. Monet's later water lily paintings, which leave out the horizon entirely, are a good example of how far it went.
Where to start on this site
Try Paris Street; Rainy Day for a city scene, The Dance Class for a quiet moment behind the scenes, and Stacks of Wheat or Water Lilies for Monet at two stages of his career. Put them side by side and compare how much detail each painter leaves out. You will often find that what is left out is as deliberate as what is put in.
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Written with AI assistance and checked against museum records and standard references. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.