The Impressionists favored landscapes, casual portraits in unremarkable domestic settings and still-lifes. They choose subjects that appeared in everyday life rather than in history. Of importance to the Impressionist was capturing the ‘fleeting moment’ and the luminous ever changing effect of sunlight. These artists felt they were able to inject their work with freshness and the immediancy of the moment. Claude Monet was quoted when he spoke of his first experience of painting outdoors, "that suddenly a veil was torn away." The Impressionists turned to painting outdoors in order to observe nature more fully. Many of them felt that by moving outdoors to paint 'Plein-air', they were able to paint away from the influence of other artists, and they were able to shake off the institutional effects that the Academies had on their personal creativity. Oil paint which became available in metal tubes, made painting ‘en plein air’ easier and more conducive.
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Edouard Manet, Stilleben mit Lachs, 1866-1869, Oil on Canvas, 73cm × 83 cm
Most of the Impressionists drew upon the precedents of the earlier French artists, believing to portray what they saw without any enhancement. This tendency for realism followed the example of French realist Gustave Courbet. The French painter Camille Corot and his management of light in nature, the landscape painters from the Barbizon School, Eugene Louis Boudin, and the Dutch painter Johan Barthold Jongkind and their seascapes, Eugéne Delacroix, with his vibrant color usage and energetic brushstrokes, all had an influence over the Impressionists.
Interestingly, the techniques used by the Impressionists were not new; painters had used them in the past, but the Impressionists were the first to employ them altogether. Somber tones, smooth blending, glazes, and finishing detail were all absent from their work. Short quick brush strokes, impasto, surfaces typically opaque were among their techniques. The play of light was all important as was the application of color applied side by side with little mining, creating a vibrant surface. Complimentary mixing provided grays and dark tones, black was avoided altogether. Soft edges and intermingling of colors were achieved by working wet into wet.
Jules Laforgue, a French poet, commented on the brushwork, "everything is obtainted by a thousand little strokes dancing in every direction like straws of colour, all in vital competition for the whole impression."
During the 1880’s, the Impressionist group began to disperse. During that time, several artists took example from the first Impressionists and began to venture into new territory and developed new precepts for the use of color, pattern, line, and form. These younger artists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec, among others, were known as post-Impressionist painters.
References: The Impressionists, A Retrospective, edited by Martha Kapos
References: The Story of Painting by Sister Wendy Beckett
References: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society by Robert L. Herbert
