In the beginning there were Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Camille Pissarro. Then they were joined by Edouard Manet; and after him Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas. These men formed the nucleus of what later came to be known as impressionism, the term coined — as is often related — in 1874 by a mocking critic, Louis Leroy, when he saw Monet's Impression: Sunrise shown in the group's first exhibition in the Paris studio of the photographer Nadar. The term was derisive, of course, but endured, and between their first exhibition in 1874 and their last in 1886, the impressionists were probably reviled and maligned more than any other artistic movement before or since. They were considered rebels, degenerates, and a menace to society by a hostile press and a jeering, disbelieving public. A comment like that of Albert Wolff was the rule:

These so-called artists style themselves Intransigeants, Impressionists....They throw a few colors on to the canvas at random, and then they sign the lot.

And Emile Zola, then a reporter on L'Evènement, not only had his favorable criticisms torn and thrown in his face on the street, but actually lost his job because he dared to defend them.

In fact, the early impressionists did not consider themselves rebels. When they organized their first exhibition they were all already mature artists who had been working for fifteen years or more. In the early 1860s, when they were evolving their personal styles, they were linked together by their dissatisfaction with the official art world and would meet at the Café Guerbois in Paris to discuss their common problems and to share ideas. Dissatisfied they may have been, but they did not consider that they were as yet beyond the pale. Manet, in fact, still endeavored to show in the Salon, and was bitterly disappointed when he was rejected. The impressionists sat there in the Café Guerbois, top-hatted and frock-coated, looking, as Cézanne once remarked, "like a bunch of lawyers!" Nevertheless, they quietly fashioned a new way of painting and made impressionism as a movement unique in the history of art up to its time.

Richard J. Boyle, American Impressionism
Copyright © 1974 by the New York Graphic Society. All rights reserved.

Posted 29 November 1996

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