Impressionism is a style or movement create in France in the 19th century. It takes his name from a french critique called Louis Leroy who wrote a satirical review in a french newspaper based on a painting from Claude Monet called “Impression, soleil levant” (the first painting in this post).
At that time academic painting was king but this group of painters didn’t wanted to paint grander subjects such as battles, ancient greek or political scenes. They wanted to paint scenes of everyday life like cooking, bathing or even just a tree and a bush.
So instead of painting in a studio they found that they could capture the momentary effects of sunlight by working quickly, in front of their subjects in the plein air. They were not trying to paint a realistic picture, but an ‘impression’ of what the subject looked like to them so they often painted thickly and used quick (and quite messy) brush strokes.
For all these reasons they faced harsh opposition and a lot of people didn’t like impressionism as they thought it was a bit messy and that the paintings looked unfinished. They thought art should be neater and that subjects in art should be more important than just everyday scenes.
To finish this post here is a quote from Claude Monet:
Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.
- High Resolution paintings from Google Art Project:
https://goo.gl/oQiowV
- Here you can find all the 1400 paintings of Claude Monet:
https://goo.gl/ThzFW9
- High resolution links in order:
dededos
dailybridgerton
gummygunk
kaledo-art
janainaart
ellievsbear
