Impressionism

Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century, and it is based on a practice: painting out of doors, spontaneously on the spot, rather than in a studio from sketches. The movement was developed by Claude Monet and other Paris-based artists from the early 1860s. Its home was Paris.

Working in front of the subject, the Impressionists found they could catch the momentary and transient effects of sunlight, and their brushwork became rapid and broken into separate dabs to render the fleeting quality of light. Their subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life: rivers, stations, kitchens, streets.

The first group exhibition was in Paris in 1874, with work by Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne. The showing was greeted with derision; Monet's Impression, Sunrise was singled out for ridicule, and the title gave the movement its name, first used by critics as an insult. Seven further exhibitions followed at intervals until 1886.

Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot were core artists of the movement, with Degas and Édouard Manet also often associated with it. Alfred Sisley, born in Paris to British parents, was a member of the Impressionist group and painted landscapes close to Pissarro's and Monet's.

Look for light doing the work: rapid, broken dabs of colour, shadows that are blue rather than brown, and subjects taken from ordinary life rather than history or scripture. The precedents were painters who worked from nature on the spot, a habit pioneered in Britain by John Constable in around 1813 to 1817.

Turner and Constable came before the movement and influenced it; Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844 shows a steam engine crossing the Maidenhead Railway Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, twenty years too early to be an Impressionist painting. Rodin was a sculptor, not a member of the group. Van Gogh and Gauguin belong to what came after, Post-Impressionism.