What we see when we look at the painting is unquestionably painted Monet made no effort to develop his suggestive image into a more detailed and finished rendering of the scene. They believed that landscapes and genres scenes (scenes of contemporary life) were worthy and important.Ĭlaude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (detail), 1874, oil on canvas, 50 × 65 cm (Musée Marmottan, Paris) These young Realists and Impressionists questioned the long established hierarchy of subject matter. The Academy deemed that only “ history painting” was great painting. Landscape and contemporary lifeĬourbet, Manet and the Impressionists also challenged the Academy’s category codes. The critics thought it was absurd to sell paintings that looked like slap-dash impressions and to present these paintings as finished works. Normally, an artist’s “impressions” were not meant to be sold, but were meant to be aids for the memory-to take these ideas back to the studio for the masterpiece on canvas. The Impressionists’ completed works looked like sketches, fast and preliminary “impressions” that artists would dash off to preserve an idea of what to paint more carefully at a later date. The paintings of Neoclassical and Romantic artists had a finished appearance. What they saw wasn’t finished in their eyes these were mere “impressions.” This was not a compliment.īerte Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) The first exhibition did not repay the artists monetarily but it did draw the critics, some of whom decided their art was abominable. Degas invited Morisot to join their risky effort. She had been accepted to the Salon, but her work had become more experimental since then. Berthe Morisot was a friend of both Degas and Manet (she would marry Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène by the end of 1874). Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Sisley had met through classes. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas, 131 x 175 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) Lack of finish He wanted Paris to come to him and accept him-even if he had to endure their ridicule in the process. Manet had set up his own pavilion during the 1867 World’s Fair, but he was not interested in giving up on the Salon jury. The impressionists regarded Manet as their inspiration and leader in their spirit of revolution, but Manet had no desire to join their cooperative venture into independent exhibitions. They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it. They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions was too long. The artists we know today as Impressionists-Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley (and several others)-could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury-which could often be quite arbitrary. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reputation and make a living as an artist). This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition-called the Salon-and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This painting was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris).
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