
It caused outrage with its frank depiction of nudity in a contemporary setting and was scorned by the high-minded salon juries and middle-class audiences of the era. The works that focused on scenes of public leisure - especially scenes of cafés and cabarets - often conveyed the new sense of alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first modern metropolis.Įdouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) was probably the most controversial artwork of the nineteenth century. Impressionism records the effects of the massive mid-19 th-century renovation of Paris, led by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city's newly constructed railway stations wide, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded streets and large, deluxe apartment buildings.Their art did not necessarily rely on realistic depictions.

The Impressionists sought to capture the former - the optical effects of light - to convey the fleeting nature of the present moment, including ambient features such as changes in weather, on their canvases.


The Impressionists also rejected official exhibitions and painting competitions set up by the French government, instead organizing their own group exhibitions, which the public were initially very hostile to. This often meant using much lighter and looser brushwork than painters had up until that point, and painting out of doors, en plein air. Instead, as their name suggests, the Impressionists tried to get down on canvas an “impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person appeared to them at a certain moment in time. They weren’t interested in painting history, mythology, or the lives of great men, and they didn’t seek perfection in visual appearances. At some point in the 1860s, a group of young artists decided to paint, very simply, what they saw, thought, and felt. Impressionism is perhaps the most important movement in the whole of modern painting.
