On 15 April 1874, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar at 35 boulevard des Capucines in Paris, about thirty artists opened an exhibition under the deliberately dull name Société Anonyme des Artistes — the Limited Company of Artists. Among them were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Paul Cézanne. They were not yet a movement with a name. Within two weeks, a mocking critic would accidentally give them one.
To understand the gamble, you need the institution they were defying. The Paris Salon was the state-sanctioned annual exhibition, and for a French painter it was effectively the only market: a jury of academicians decided what hung, medals made careers, and rejection could mean ruin. The jury liked polished surfaces, mythology and history painting; it did not like sketchy brushwork or scenes of ordinary modern life. The backlog of resentment was old — in 1863 so many works were refused that Emperor Napoleon III ordered a separate Salon des Refusés, where Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe — a nude woman picnicking among fully dressed men, painted with defiant flatness — scandalised a public that came specifically to jeer. By 1874 Monet and his friends had concluded that begging the jury was hopeless, and simply went around it: their own show, self-funded, with works for sale directly to the public.
A sneer in Le Charivari
The exhibition drew modest crowds — a few thousand visitors over a month, against the Salon's hundreds of thousands — and plenty of mockery. The decisive jab came from Louis Leroy, a critic for the satirical paper Le Charivari, who wrote up his visit on 25 April as a comic dialogue in which a bewildered academic painter is driven mad by what he sees. In front of Monet's harbour scene from Le Havre, catalogued as Impression, soleil levant — Impression, Sunrise — Leroy pounced on the title: an impression indeed, he scoffed, and wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than that seascape. He headlined the piece “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”. The insult was meant to sting; instead it stuck. The painters themselves adopted it within a few years — by their third show in 1877 they were billing themselves as Impressionists — though Degas always hated the label and preferred “independents”.
What the sneer missed was that the group's method was a coherent revolution, made possible by very practical things. Paint in portable metal tubes, a mid-century invention, freed artists to work outdoors in front of the subject. Fast brushwork was not laziness but a tool for catching what studio painting could not: weather, steam, glare, the flicker of a crowd. The subjects were railway stations, riverside cafés and suburban gardens rather than gods and generals. Colour went onto the canvas in broken touches for the eye to mix at a distance, and shadows were painted in blues and violets rather than academic brown. To academic taste this looked unfinished; to the twentieth century it would look like the beginning of modern art.
Eight shows and an afterlife
The group exhibited together eight times between 1874 and 1886, with a shifting cast and constant quarrels. Only Pissarro, the movement's patient elder, showed in all eight. Morisot — the rare woman at the heart of the group — missed just one, after the birth of her daughter. Cézanne drifted off to reinvent painting on his own terms; Monet outlived them all, painting water lilies at Giverny into the 1920s, long enough to see the once-mocked style become France's most exportable cultural treasure. The Salon's monopoly, meanwhile, never recovered: the Impressionists had proved that artists could reach the public without official blessing, a lesson every avant-garde since has relied on.
As for the painting that named the movement, Impression, Sunrise hangs in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris — most of the time. In 1985 armed robbers lifted it, along with eight other works, and it vanished for five years before police recovered it in Corsica in 1990. Even in disgrace and in absence, the little harbour sketch kept its strange authority: a picture dashed off in front of a sunrise, named almost casually, ridiculed in print — and now the one-word summary of an entire way of seeing. Leroy meant to bury the new painting with a joke. The joke turned out to be the tombstone of the old painting instead.
Quiz nuggets
- The first Impressionist exhibition opened on 15 April 1874 in the former Paris studio of the photographer Nadar.
- Critic Louis Leroy coined “Impressionists” as an insult in the satirical paper Le Charivari, mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise.
- Impression, Sunrise depicts the harbour of Le Havre, Monet's home town.
- The group held eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886; Camille Pissarro was the only artist to show in all eight.
- Impression, Sunrise was stolen from the Musée Marmottan in 1985 and recovered in Corsica in 1990.