A Reader's Guide to Impressionism: What Monet, Renoir, and Degas Did in 1874

In April 1874, thirty painters rented a photographer's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and hung 165 paintings on its walls. The official Salon had rejected most of them. The critics who walked through the rooms were ready to be unimpressed, and they were. One reviewer, Louis Leroy, picked a small canvas of a harbour at dawn — a Monet, called Impression, soleil levant — and used its title to mock the entire exhibition.

He meant the word impression as an insult. The painters kept it.

That month, in that rented studio, the artists we now call the Impressionists made themselves a movement. To understand any single one of them — Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt — you have to understand what they were standing against, and what they were building toward.

The exhibition that changed painting

Before 1874, a French painter's career ran through the Salon: an annual juried exhibition controlled by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The Salon rewarded historical subjects, religious narratives, and idealised mythology, painted in muted tones with invisible brushwork. A painting's surface was supposed to disappear so the subject could glow through it. A career depended on selection.

The painters who organised the 1874 exhibition had been rejected by the Salon, repeatedly. Some were independently wealthy. Most weren't. They formed a cooperative — the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs — and rented Nadar's photography studio for one month to show work the Salon had refused. They hung Monets, Pissarros, Renoirs, Degas, Morisots, Cézannes, and Sisleys side by side on the walls of a working photographer.

The show ran for a month. Three thousand people came. Most laughed. Leroy's review in Le Charivari called the group "Impressionists," using the word to suggest that the paintings were unfinished — quick impressions, sketches mistaken for finished work.

The group ran seven more exhibitions through 1886. By then the term Impressionism had stuck, and the Salon's monopoly had broken.

What makes a painting Impressionist

Strip away the legend and Impressionism is a set of choices you can see in the paint:

• Visible brushwork. Strokes aren't blended away. A Monet sky is a hundred separate dabs of blue, violet, and pink, and the eye does the mixing.

• Painted en plein air. Many Impressionists set up easels outdoors and painted what they saw in the time the light gave them. A canvas might be started, abandoned, and re-attempted across days as the weather changed.

• Modern life as subject. Cafés, railway stations, boulevards, racetracks, ballet rehearsals, suburban gardens. Not gods, not saints, not allegory. What a Parisian in 1874 actually walked past.

• Light over line. The Salon painters drew first and coloured second. The Impressionists worked in pure colour from the beginning, letting form emerge from where one colour ended and another began.

• Snapshot composition. Figures cut off at the frame, asymmetric balance, viewpoints from above or behind — borrowed partly from Japanese woodblock prints (then flooding Paris in trade) and partly from the new medium of photography.

A painting can be Impressionist by some of these criteria and not others. Degas almost never painted outdoors. Cassatt rarely painted modern Paris. The marker is the philosophy, not the checklist: paint what you see, painted the way the eye actually sees it.

The painters you need to know

Claude Monet (1840–1926)

Monet is the centre. He is the painter who pushed en plein air practice the hardest, who spent decades painting the same subjects — haystacks, the façade of Rouen Cathedral, his own water-lily pond — under different lights, in different seasons, at different hours. Impression, soleil levant (1872), the painting that gave the movement its name, shows the harbour at Le Havre at sunrise, the orange disc of the sun balanced on a strip of water that is also a strip of brushstrokes.

When you read about Monet's gardens at Giverny — the green Japanese bridge, the Nymphéas canvases that now line two oval rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie — you are reading about the last forty years of a painter who decided light itself was the only subject worth a lifetime.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)

Renoir is the warm centre of the group. His Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) is the social Impressionism — a Sunday-afternoon dance in Montmartre, dappled sunlight breaking through trees onto the faces of working-class Parisians at leisure. Renoir painted the people and the pleasure of being among them. He left more nudes, more portraits, more flushed cheeks and informal poses than any other Impressionist, and his late work, after he turned to a more sculptural style in the 1890s, sits on the bridge between Impressionism and what came next.

Edgar Degas (1834–1917)

Degas insisted he was not an Impressionist. He preferred the term Realist and was suspicious of plein air practice — most of his work was done in the studio, from memory, from sketches, from photographs. But he showed in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, and his commitment to modern subjects — the ballet rehearsal, the laundress, the racetrack, the woman bathing — placed him at the centre of the group whether he liked it or not. The Dance Class (1874) shows the back rooms of the Opéra: not the stage, the rehearsal. That is the Impressionist move — to paint where painting hadn't gone.

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903)

Pissarro was the oldest of the core Impressionists and the only one who showed in all eight group exhibitions. He was the steady centre — politically anarchist, generous as a teacher to the next generation (Cézanne and Gauguin both learned from him), and the most prolific landscape painter of the movement. Boulevard Montmartre, Spring (1897), painted from a hotel window above the street, shows the Impressionist eye at full strength: traffic, leafless trees, a wash of pale grey-violet pavement, all built from small touches of colour.

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)

Cassatt was American, born in Pittsburgh, working in Paris from the 1870s onward. She was the only American — and one of only three women — in the core Impressionist group. Degas invited her to join in 1879. Her subject, almost exclusively, was the private life of women and children: a mother bathing a child, a woman reading in lamplight, a daughter being held. The Child's Bath (1893) is the canonical one — high viewpoint, decorative pattern, an intimacy without sentimentality. Cassatt also worked in colour drypoint and aquatint, producing some of the most beautiful prints of the era, openly indebted to the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition she collected.

Where Impressionism ends, Post-Impressionism begins

By the mid-1880s, the painters who had defined Impressionism were turning. Cézanne wanted structure — to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums." Seurat wanted system — pointillism, divisionism, colour theory rebuilt as method. Van Gogh wanted feeling — Impressionist colour pushed into psychological intensity. Gauguin wanted symbol — colour decoupled from observation, used for meaning.

These four painters are usually grouped under the term Post-Impressionism, coined in 1910 by the British critic Roger Fry. They are not a movement so much as four solo paths out of the Impressionist door. Each was rejecting some part of what Monet had taught, while keeping the part that had given them permission to paint what they saw, the way they saw it.

Where to see Impressionist originals

If you can travel:

• Musée d'Orsay, Paris — the largest collection. Bal du moulin de la Galette, Impression, soleil levant (on long-term loan from Marmottan), Degas's bronze and wax dancers, Caillebotte's Floor Scrapers.

• Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris — the Monet family bequest. Impression, soleil levant and dozens of late water lilies.

• Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris — the two oval rooms with the great Nymphéas canvases. Sit on the bench. Stay an hour.

• The Met, New York — the largest Impressionist holdings outside France. Wide Monet and Manet, strong Cassatt and Degas.

• Art Institute of Chicago — the Caillebotte Paris Street; Rainy Day, Seurat's La Grande Jatte, an extraordinary Cassatt collection.

• The Phillips Collection, Washington — Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, in a domestic setting that approximates how a private collector once lived with it.

Key takeaways

• Impressionism began as a group exhibition in 1874, in a rented Paris photography studio.

• The term was originally an insult. The painters kept it.

• The five canonical Impressionists are Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, and Cassatt — though the wider group includes Manet, Morisot, Sisley, Bazille, Caillebotte, and Cézanne in his early phase.

• Impressionism is defined less by a checklist of techniques than by a philosophy: paint what you see, the way you see it, in the light you see it in.

• By the late 1880s the movement had splintered into Post-Impressionism — Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin — each taking one piece of the Impressionist inheritance somewhere new.

Continue reading

If you want to go deeper into a single painter, the archive includes long essays on individual works:

• Edouard Manet's The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil — Manet painting Monet painting his own family.

• Claude Monet's The Garden of Monet at Argenteuil — the early Giverny years.

• Claude Monet's Poppy Fields near Argenteuil — the canonical Monet landscape.

• Claude Monet's Bodmer Oak — a single tree, painted in late autumn light.

If a particular Impressionist work catches your eye, the curated edition prints live in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.