Tag Archives: Impression Sunrise

Claude Monet exhibits Impression, Sunrise (1874)

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.

 

 

Claude Mon­et