They are Impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape.

– Jules-Antoine Castagnary

In 1874, a group of artists in Paris formed a society for the purpose of exhibiting their work independently of the Salon, the official exhibition program the French government established in 1748. This new group staged eight public exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, revealing an approach to painting that privileged ‘impressions’ – often painted en plein air (outdoors, directly in front of the subject) – over what the selecting judges for the Salon considered ‘finished’ works, which were highly academic in style and painted entirely in the studio. In critical responses to these independent exhibitions, this daring, varied and ambitious new painting became known as Impressionism.

The Impressionists were united by a common belief that they should respond to and represent the world around them. This was not a world populated by traditional art historical subjects, such as gods and goddesses, biblical figures or heroic military leaders. Instead, their attention was on the world in which they lived and worked, with a primary focus on nature.

Social connections among the artists also played an important role in the development of Impressionism. These artists knew each other and each other’s work, and held strong opinions on the aims, limits and directions of their own art and the art world of their time. They wrote to and about one another, they sometimes painted side by side, and they exhibited together. Throughout the exhibition are extracts from letters, journal entries and other primary sources, which connect the artists’ voices to the fresh and inspiring vision for which Impressionism is so celebrated.

The role of artistic camaraderie is evoked in this pair of quintessentially Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Monet and Renoir met as art students in Paris, and undertook numerous painting excursions together in the 1860s. Both artists loved to capture radiant outdoor light and vegetation, painting scenes suggestive of leisure and ease. Although their foci differed, both Renoir and Monet were committed to painting the world around them as they saw it, directly in front of the subject and en plein air (outdoors).

The Forest of Fontainebleau was a popular destination for artists during the 1820s–70s. Just over 50 kilometres south-east of Paris, it offered an abundance of natural motifs including rock formations and plains, as well as old-growth trees. The railway connection built in the middle of the century made the famed forest just over an hour’s journey from the capital, enabling easy access by tourists and artists.

The nearby villages of Chailly and Barbizon offered lodgings that attracted many artists and fostered a creative community, which shared ideas or travelled together on painting excursions. After moving to Paris to pursue his artistic training, Claude Monet and his peers, who admired these artists and their direct engagement with the land, visited Barbizon and Chailly for extended painting sojourns in the early 1860s, their formative years as aspiring artists.

The name School of Barbizon was applied to artists who flocked to the small village of the same name in the 1830s and brought their paintings of rugged nature back to Paris, influencing the next generation of artists – the Impressionists.

To bathe in the depths of the sky. To express the gentleness of clouds … to set the blue of the sky alight. I can feel all this within me, poised and awaiting expression. What joy and yet what torment!

– Eugène Boudin

Both Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet grew up in Normandy and maintained a lifelong friendship after meeting early in their respective careers. Boudin encouraged Monet, who was sixteen years his junior, to paint outdoors, telling him ‘a work painted directly on the spot has always a strength, a power, a vividness of touch that one doesn’t find again in the studio’. Boudin’s paintings feature a unifying focus on water and sky – a fascination shared with Monet and the younger Impressionists.

Monet would credit Boudin with his artistic formation, recalling how: ‘One day Boudin said to me: “Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky”. I took his advice and together we went on long outings during which I painted constantly from nature. This was how I came to understand nature and learned to love it passionately … I have said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him’.

While they spent much time painting outdoors, the Impressionists also worked in the studio for many reasons, such as creating still-life paintings. ‘I’m astonished that these painted studies of flowers find any takers, it is such a painterly feeling I’m always astounded that anyone but painters has a taste for them,’ confided Henri Fantin-Latour about his still-life paintings. For some of the Impressionist painters, however, their still-life paintings found a ready market, possibly because their compositions were more conventionally appealing than their landscapes.

In practical terms, still-life subjects were easier to arrange and light – a creative alternative to the vagaries of weather when working outdoors. Still life also allowed the artists to work towards their painterly goals, as Berthe Morisot observed: ‘To catch the fleeting moment – anything, however small, a smile, a flower, a fruit – is an ambition.’ Others, like Paul Cézanne, were more specific and enthusiastic: ‘As to flowers, I have given them up. They wilt immediately. Fruits are more reliable. They love having their portraits done.’

Flickering colour and light on rippling watery surfaces were favoured subjects for the Impressionists and their friends. Direct engagement with the fleeting and momentary nature of water is paired with innovative compositions, in which the viewer appears to hover above or float on the surface of a body of water. Édouard Manet dubbed Monet the ‘Raphael of water’, his achievements in capturing its many moods and appearances overshadowing those around him. Charles François Daubigny, an older artist who was a great champion of Monet’s work, first created a studio boat, or floating atelier, for painting rivers on location. Like Boudin, Johan Barthold Jongkind, a Dutch marine painter who spent much of his career in France, also encouraged the young Monet’s interest in marine painting. Monet’s peers took a variety of approaches to waterways: some, like the Norwegian Frits Thaulow, revelled in rippling colours and reflections; and others, like Paul Cézanne, used an expanse of pond water to challenge perception of depth and space in his composition. Alfred Sisley also experimented with compositions and effects, describing the river Loing, a regular subject in his work, as ‘so beautiful, so translucent, so changeable’.

Perhaps we all come from Pissarro.

– Paul Cézanne

Camille Pissarro was the oldest member of the Impressionist group and among its most daring innovators. He was a dedicated family man, living outside of Paris where costs were more manageable, but despite living away from the artistic centre, Pissarro remained abreast of new directions and was sought out by others for advice. He was also open to learning from others. In the latter half of the 1880s, Pissarro experimented with Neo-Impressionism, having been introduced to its younger practitioners by his son Lucien. His interest in this new painting technique, which abandoned the wet-on-wet application of harmonious tones preferred by Impressionism in favour of placing strong, opposing blocks of colour side by side was, however, short-lived. His own distinctive vision demanded a less rigorously theoretical approach.

By 1895, Pissarro was exasperated with critics who derided superficial similarities between his works and the work of others: ‘In Cézanne’s show at Vollard’s there are certain landscapes of Auvers and Pontoise that [they say] are similar to mine. Naturally, we were always together! But what cannot be denied is that each of us kept the only thing that counts, the unique “sensation”!’

The new painters have tried to render the walk, the movement, and hustle and bustle of passers-by, just as they have tried to render the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water, and the vibration of sun-drenched air.

– Edmond Duranty

While much Impressionist art celebrates natural light and outdoor suburban or coastal scenes, certain artists thrived on the energy and rapid change of urban life and, in turn, on the regular interaction with other artists that the city afforded. They were enthralled by Paris’s lively entertainments, motivated by the accessibility of professional models, and absorbed by the everyday experiences of the city streets and the way people lived. As Edgar Degas wrote of his home and the source of his subjects, ‘Paris is charming and is not work the only possession one can always have at will?’

Increasing urbanisation and industrialisation brought rapid change to social customs and fashions. In Paris, such spectacle both attracted and repelled, creating interest as well as anxiety. The Impressionists and their circle reflected these changes in their scenes of urban subjects. Édouard Manet’s childhood friend Antonin Proust recalled that Manet revelled in the modernisation of Paris under Napoleon III, and saw art and artistry in the renewed city precincts, its grand boulevards and great stone edifices: ‘[W]ith Manet, the eye played such a big role that Paris has never known a flâneur [one who walks the streets, observing the crowd] like him nor a flâneur strolling more usefully.’

An artist, under pain of oblivion, must have confidence in himself, and listen only to his real master: Nature.

– Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Learning, experimentation and the acceptance of missteps on the path to improvement, were central tenets of Renoir’s artistic life, and brought about numerous transformations in his work. ‘I am suffering from the illness of experimentation’, Renoir confided to his dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1881. This was the year of the Impressionists’ sixth independent exhibition, and a year before Durand-Ruel would offer Renoir the opportunity of a solo exhibition of his work, from which paintings would travel from Paris to London and New York. Nevertheless, Renoir worried that he had undertaken insufficient artistic training in his youth, and was not adept enough as a draughtsman.

In the 1880s, Renoir experimented with a range of pictorial effects. In landscapes and figural works, scenes of suburban Paris or more far-flung destinations, Renoir pursued an ongoing self-education. By the end of the decade, the artist’s friends feared he had gone too far. ‘Renoir, lacking a gift for drawing, lacking the beautiful colours that he instinctively felt before, becomes incoherent’, Camille Pissarro complained. While certainly not indecipherable, as Pissarro stated, Renoir’s range of painterly touches across works and within single compositions urges careful, sustained consideration.

By May 1879, at the close of the fourth Impressionist exhibition, discussions were underway between Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Camille Pissarro and others about publishing a new journal of original etchings, to be titled Le Jour et la nuit (Day and night). Intense activity continued in late 1879–80, with Degas leading the charge, encouraging his friends, sharing technical advice and even printing some of their plates. For reasons not fully known the journal itself was never realised, yet the project inspired Cassatt, Pissarro and Degas to make a group of etchings that are some of the most inventive prints of the late nineteenth century.

By combining different techniques and working their plates through multiple states, the artists created a new pictorial language for printmaking that was as complex and nuanced as that used in their Impressionist painting, and equally responsive to conveying their new vision of the world. The proof prints made for Le Jour et la nuit provide insight into the creative minds of these artists at a moment of great experimentation in their printmaking, and also into the subjects they presented in their paintings.

Monet’s paintings are specific, about his having experienced the light, the atmosphere – the enveloppe, as he called it – of a particular place. But they are also suggestive: able to evoke in the viewer resonances with her or his own experiences of gardens, fields, coasts or watery surfaces, beyond locations specified in the titles. Monet moved from Paris to Argenteuil, and then progressively further down the Seine before settling in Giverny. He returned time and again to locations dear to him, whether they were within walking distance of his home or further afield. ‘I would stop wherever I found nature inviting,’ Monet described, ‘Inspiring motifs could be chanced upon.’

These paintings represent some of Monet’s most cherished places: Argenteuil, the Normandy coast, the Mediterranean coast and Giverny, both its fields and the artist’s own waterlily garden there. They reveal the immediacy of Monet’s approach to painting, balancing a specificity of place with something more universal. Everywhere he travelled, Monet found splendour in the ordinary, making everyday scenes appear dazzling and teaching the modern eye to see the world anew.