Impressionism: light, touch and modern leisure

Stand close to a Monet and it falls apart. Commas, dashes and blobs of unmixed paint sit side by side like tiles; nothing is drawn, nothing is smoothed. Step back six feet and water, poplars and the shiver of light on a river reassemble themselves. That gap between what the surface is and what the eye makes of it is the whole point, and it is the first thing to check when you are trying to place an unfamiliar nineteenth-century canvas.

What the Academy expected, and what they did instead

To see why a Monet looked like vandalism in 1874, you need the convention it broke. The French Academy and the Salon jury wanted a finished picture: contours drawn, brushwork invisible, form built by chiaroscuro — modelling from light to dark through tonal gradation, with shadows made by darkening the local colour with brown, bitumen or black. Subjects were ranked, history painting at the top, and the whole thing was done in a studio from drawings.

The Impressionists inverted nearly every item on that list. They painted outdoors, at speed, in front of the motif. They modelled with colour rather than tone. They kept the brushmark. And they painted the least prestigious subject matter imaginable: people enjoying their Sunday.

The four tells on the surface

Broken colour. Small strokes of relatively pure pigment laid adjacent rather than blended on the palette. Physical mixing of pigments is subtractive and dulls them; keeping them separate and letting the eye do the work at viewing distance preserves the brightness. This is why an Impressionist canvas, even a grey one, glows next to a Salon painting.

Visible touch. Each artist has a handwriting: Monet’s short comma; Renoir’s feathery, melting stroke; Pissarro’s dense granular stipple; Sisley’s flatter, drier scumble. The marks are never sanded away.

Coloured shadows. In daylight a shadow is filled with blue skylight and tends toward the complementary of the illuminating light. Warm sun, violet shadow. Black all but disappears from the palette of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley — a useful negative test.

Dissolved edges. Contours are not drawn but arrived at where one patch of colour meets another. A hat brim against sky will be a broken frontier, not a line.

Two material facts enabled all of it: the collapsible metal paint tube, patented in 1841, which made ready-ground paint portable; and a new generation of bright synthetic pigments — cobalt and cerulean blue, chrome yellow, viridian, synthetic ultramarine — that made the high-keyed palette possible at all.

The subjects give the period away

If the handling tells you the movement, the subjects confirm the decade. Impressionism is the art of the new Parisian weekend: boating at Argenteuil and Chatou, the Gare Saint-Lazare under its glass roof, boulevards seen from a fourth-floor window, the racecourse at Longchamp, cafés-concerts, the ballet, girls in summer dresses under dappled leaves.

Contrast the generation immediately before. Courbet’s and Millet’s Realism takes rural labour and poverty seriously, in a grave, dark, tonal palette. Same commitment to the contemporary world, opposite weather. If a picture shows peasants and the palette is brown, you are in the 1850s, not the 1870s.

Cropping, photography and Japan

A second, quieter tell is the shape of the composition. Figures sliced by the frame, high tilted viewpoints, a great empty diagonal of floor or water in the foreground, the main event pushed into a corner — none of this is classical design. Two things arrived at once: photography, which normalised the accidental crop, and the Japanese woodblock print, which flooded Paris after Japan reopened to trade and offered flat colour areas, bold asymmetry and decorative diagonals. Degas takes it furthest; Cassatt’s prints are almost transcriptions of it.

The 1874 exhibition

In April 1874 a group calling itself the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs mounted its own show in the vacated studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines — deliberately outside the Salon system. Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley and Cézanne all showed. The critic Louis Leroy, reviewing for Le Charivari, fastened on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise and wrote a mocking dialogue about “Impressionists”. The insult stuck and was adopted. Seven further exhibitions followed, the last in 1886; only Pissarro appeared in all eight.

Telling them apart

A few extra levers. Monet’s series — the Haystacks from 1890, Rouen Cathedral 1892–94, the Water Lilies to his death in 1926 — fix the motif and vary the light; nobody else does this systematically. Renoir after about 1883 goes through an “Ingresque” crisis and comes out harder and more sculpted, so a late Renoir nude looks drier than you expect. Degas worked from memory and drawings indoors and disliked being called an Impressionist at all. Pissarro converted to Seurat’s dots for a few years around 1886–90, which is the single most common cause of a misattributed Pissarro.

Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt belong here too, not as footnotes. Morisot’s touch is the freest in the group — passages of bare primed canvas left showing. Cassatt draws firmly and flattens like a Japanese printmaker. Both paint interiors, nurseries, balconies and dressing rooms, in part because the backstage and the bar were not places a respectable woman could go to work.

The traps

Manet is not an Impressionist. He is the older painter the group looked to, and he kept submitting to the Salon rather than joining their shows. His method is opposite: flat tonal patches, hard silhouettes, and lots of black, learned from Velázquez and Hals. Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, both 1863, predate the movement. Only in the mid-1870s, painting alongside Monet at Argenteuil, does his handling loosen.

Late Impressionism drifts. Monet’s water lilies after 1910 are so near-abstract that people reach for later labels. They are still Impressionism, just pushed to its limit by a nearly blind painter.

The style went international and lagged. Sickert and Wilson Steer in Britain, Sorolla in Spain, Liebermann in Germany, Hassam and Chase in America are working in an Impressionist manner well into the twentieth century. A dappled plein-air canvas is not automatically French and not automatically 1875.

Cézanne exhibited in 1874 and 1877 but was never really one of them; his answer to Impressionism is the subject of the next topic.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Go close in your mind’s eye. Are the brushstrokes separate, visible and unblended? If the surface is licked smooth, it is academic, not Impressionist.
2. Find a shadow. Blue, violet or green shadow says Impressionist or later; brown and black shadow says Salon, Realist or earlier.
3. Check the edges. Contours dissolving into adjacent colour, rather than drawn lines, confirms it.
4. Read the subject. Weekend leisure, the modern city, railways, the ballet, the river — Impressionism. Rural toil in a dark key — Realism, twenty years earlier.
5. Look at the framing. Figures cut by the edge, a tilted high viewpoint, a big empty foreground — photography and Japanese prints, so after about 1865.
6. Hunt for black. Plenty of it in a loose modern-life picture points to Manet or Degas rather than Monet, Renoir or Pissarro.
7. Then separate the hands. Landscape and light alone, comma strokes: Monet. Warm flesh and dappled pleasure: Renoir. Contour, pastel and stage light: Degas. Cool earthy villages, dense stipple: Pissarro. Freest, sketchiest, domestic: Morisot.
8. Ask whether the dots are regular. Even, systematic dots mean pointillism — Seurat, Signac, or Pissarro in his 1886–90 phase — not Impressionism proper.
9. Check for a series. The same motif under different light, more than once, is almost certainly Monet after 1890.
10. Sanity-check the nationality. If it is Impressionist in manner but the place looks English, Spanish or American, allow a couple of decades of lag before you date it.