In 1872, Claude Monet visited his hometown of Le Havre in the north west of France and proceeded to paint six canvases depicting the port “during dawn, day, dusk, and dark and from varying viewpoints, some from the water itself and others from a hotel room looking down over the port”. One painting from this series was to become very famous.
Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise) was debuted in April 1874 in Paris at an independent exhibition launched as an alternative to the official Salon de Paris exhibitions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. The exhibition, by a group calling itself the “Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs etc” was led by Monet, along with other such future luminaries as Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Two hundred works were shown and about 4,000 people attended, including, of course, some rather unsympathetic critics.
Monet described how he came up with a title for the painting: “They asked me for a title for the catalogue…it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre, so I said: ‘Put Impression’ “. While this title was apparently chosen in haste for the catalogue, the term “Impressionism” was not new. It had been used for some time to describe the effect of some of the naturalistic paintings emanating from the so-called Barbizon school of painters. However, it was in critic Louis Leroy’s review of the 1874 exhibition, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”, for the newspaper Le Charivari, that he used “Impressionism” to describe this new style of work displayed, and he said it was typified by Monet’s painting.
This term, then, initially used to both describe and deprecate a movement, was taken up by all parties to describe the style, and Monet’s Impression, Sunrise was thus considered to have encapsulated the start of the movement. The rest, as they say, is history.
