Introduction

Impressionism is a movement in painting that originated in France in the late 19th century. Impressionist broke many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier generations. They found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history, which was the accepted source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had defined, the impressionists tried to depict what they saw at a moment, capturing a fresh, original vision that was hard for some people to accept as beautiful. They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they could observe nature more directly and especially the changing light of the sun.

Origins

In 1874 French art critic Louis Leroy coined the term impressionist in a satirical review of a private exhibition of paintings by a group called The Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. Leroy was prompted to use this term in part by a modest and sketchy harbor scene called Impression, Sunrise by Monet. The term impressionist struck Leroy as an appropriate description of the loose, inexact manner of painting of Monet and several other painters in the exhibition. Leroy argued that as soon as these artists had suggested an impression of a subject by means of a few abrupt, shorthand brushstrokes, they were satisfied and stopped work.

The impressionists held seven subsequent exhibitions between 1876 and 1886. What united this group was not style so much as a desire to gain independence from an annual government-sponsored exhibition in Paris called the Salon. To exhibit at the Salon, artists were required to submit work to a jury that applied outmoded standards in deciding which works were acceptable.

For the first historians of the movement, the landscapes represented impressionism in its purest form. The technique of applying paint in small dabs perfectly captured the flickering quality of sunlight, especially its reflections on water.

Many of the practices and objectives of the impressionists had precedents in earlier French painting of the 19th century. Most of the impressionists shared a belief in painting the unembellished truth of what they saw, and in this concern for realism they followed the tendencies of earlier French realists.

Style

The style of impressionist painting has several characteristic features. To achieve the appearance of spontaneity, impressionist painters used broken brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colors. This practice produced loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the carefully blended colors and smooth surfaces favored by most artists of the time. The colors in impressionist paintings have an overall luminosity because the painters avoided blacks and earth colors. The impressionists also simplified their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a striking overall effect.

The impressionist objective was to capture the fleeting moment, the optical sensation produced by a chance effect of weather, light, or movement.

Subjects

The impressionists specialized in landscape, informal portraits in a domestic setting and still life. Many impressionist landscapes depict unremarkable corners of nature with no obvious point of interest.

The most ephemeral aspects, the most fugacious, those which attract the painters; the sea's movements, the sky and its mobile clouds, the sun's vibrations.

Technique

It was the novelty of their technique more than their subject matter that set the impressionists apart from their contemporaries. They rejected somber tones and a painstaking degree. Instead of creating smoothly blended colors, the impressionists placed separate touches of vibrantly contrasting colors directly onto the canvas, sometimes without prior mixing on the palette, and allowed their brushstrokes to retain the liveliness and seeming spontaneity of a sketch.

The impressionists worked quickly to preserve a feeling of spontaneity and directness. They often painted one color on top of another that was still wet, a practice that tends to blur contours and soften forms.

The impressionists put into practice new scientific theories about color: To enhance the intensity of colors in their paintings, they avoided black or earth colors for depicting shadows and substituted complementary colors.

Although each impressionist had his individual way of applying paint, they all tended to prefer impasto (thick, textural dabs of paint) to more traditional glazes (thin, transparent layers of paint).

Vincent Van gogh (1853-1890)

He was born in Groof -Zudert in the Dutch Brabante.

He was drawing the action of a landscape to express his feelings.He expressed a powerful realism and a ordinary materialism , but not lacking of poetry. He said: "The color by itself expresses something"

Works: typical works as Bedroom at Arles (1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York Crows in the Wheatfields (1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh),rk City).

He seek a technique of colors and simple lines.

Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)

He was born in Albi. Of the impresionism he takes the employment of the pure tones and the touch with juxtaposed shadings.

He said: "Only the figure exists, the landscape is not neither it must be more than an accessory: the painter peasantry pure only is gross, the landscape should not serve more than to understand better the figure character

Works: the Large Bathers(circa 1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia) are La Goulou Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec, Albi), Jane Avril Entering the Moulin Rouge (1892, Courtauld Gallery, London), and Au salon de la rue des Moulins (1894, Musée Toulouse-Lautrec).

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

He is based on the carelessness of the form on benefit of the color appearance. His art consists of painting the free air and discovers beauties of the natural light that it incite to emphasize the color.

He associates spontaneity and severity. He said: "The light is something that it can not be reproduced but it must be represented by other thing, by the color"

Works: the Large Bathers(circa 1899-1906, Museum of Art, Philadelphia), Peaches and Pears (1888), Mont Sainte-Victoire From the Southwest with Trees and a House.

Renoir (1841-1919)

He born in Limongnes . He adopts the impressionist technique under the influence of Claude Monet, in landscapes as well as in figures and nude personages .He publishes the art book of Chennino Fennir. He paints luminous canvas with clear and colored colors.

He paints Landscapes, nudes and personages of the daily life. In the impressionism to the nude, he executes a very brilliant canva with colored stains and luminous reflexes, to give to the figure humanizes a prevailing paper. He produces his spirituality, friskiness and intelligence. Symbolize the captivation and the feminine grace.

Impressionist works Renoir's Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1876, Louvre, Paris), an open-air scene of a café, in which his mastery in figure painting and in representing light is evident. Outstanding examples of his talents as a portraitist are Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and Jeanne Samary (1879, Louvre). Other notable paintings by Renoir include La Loge (1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London); Woman with Fan (1875) and The Swing (1875), both in the Louvre, Paris; The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.); and Vase of Chrysanthemums (1895, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Rouen)—one of the many still lifes of flowers and fruit he painted throughout his life.

Edgard Degas (1834-1917)

He was born in Paris.

He is focused to the clear and live tones and to the optical mixture. However, rarely he painted in the open air .He said: "The drawing is not the form , it is the way of see the form".He approachs the historical painting: in Ballet Rehearsal (1876, Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum). Woman with Chrysanthemums (1865, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), including Fin d'arabesque (1877, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France).

In these works he has a conception of balance, harmony sense in the composition, care of the line. After 1865 he takes works more realistic on modernism . He pursued unfailingly the forms secret, their geometry. He said: "My art does not have nothing of spontaneous, it is only a reflection" He modeled nude statue, dancers and horses.

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

He was born in Paris. His topics are realistic, they are taken of the journalistic news.

His technical is exempt and fugacious, his clear colors with stains and contrasting with blacks and gray, seduce to the artists in search of the novelty. Manet introduced the clear painting. In his paints, many parts remain obscure, the blacks and the brown alternate with the clear tones.

Works: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay), The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Courtauld Institute and Galleries, London), Argenteuil, which depicts a couple on a boating excursion, was painted in 1874. It is in

the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai, Belgium.

Rodin, Auguste (1840-1917)

French sculptor that endowed to his work of great psychological force expressed through the modeling one and the texture. For Rodin, the beauty in the art consisted on a trustworthy representation of the interior state, and to often achieve this end it distorted the anatomy subtly. Its sculpture, in brass and marble, is divided in two styles. The most characteristic style reveals a hardness deliberated in the form and a laborious one modeling of the texture; the other one is marked by a refined surface and the fineness in the way. Rodin also produced numerous portraits in those that the emotional states of the fellows are revealed. Among them, the French writers' full-length squares Honoré Balzac and Victor Hugo, as well as of the painting Jules Bastien-Lepage; he also made the French artists' busts Jules Dalou, Carrier-Belleuse and Pierre Puvis of Chavannes. including notably the Man with the Broken Nose. He initially gained recognition in 1877, however, when his male nude figure The Age of Bronze was exhibited at the Salon. nude statue, St. John the Baptist works are The Kiss, Ugolino, The Thinker, Adam, and Eve. In 1886 he completed The Burghers of Calais

The impressionist Literature wanted to escape of the reality, and to excel the feelings in the quotidian life. In the suffering and pain, the artists find the impulse to resolve his life. Their power was in their imagination and it was considered like a divine being. The old world didn't satisfy of men, and then the artists try to do it and the humanity has a strength for doing a new creation. That's why the artist began to change.

Marcel Prust (1871-1922),

The importance of the Proust´ novels lies not so much in its descriptions of the changing French society as in the psychological development of the characters and in their philosophical concern for the time. When he traced his hero's trajectory from the happy childhood until the romantic commitment of his own conscience as writer, he looked for eternal truths, able to reveal the relationship of the senses and the experience, the buried memory that suddenly it is liberated in the face of a daily event, and the beauty of the life, darkened by the habit and the routine, but accessible through the art. His novels are , the lengthy cyclic novel, Swann's Way (1913; trans. 1928), Five years later the second part, Within a Budding Grove (1919; trans. 1922), was a great success and won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. The third and fourth parts, The Guermantes Way (2 volumes, 1920-21; trans. 1925) and Cities of the Plain (2 volumes, 1921-22; trans. 1927), were also well received. The three final parts, left in manuscript form at Proust's death, were published posthumously: The Captive (1923; trans. 1929), The Sweet Cheat Gone (2 volumes, 1925; trans. 1930), and Time Regained (2 volumes, 1927; trans. 1932).

Oscar Wilde in the Impressionist

Oscar had a passion to describe the physics beauty; he chooses in the poetry the news themes, new manner of art, and new intellectual and fanciful enjoyments. For he, there was a difference between a classic spirit and romantic spirit; the romantic spirit is about type and the other about exception. He says that the new artists gave a deeper spiritual value than a decorative value. The character of artist wasn't the faculty to feel, whether to express. The art is used to show the social matter, and the poet is the spectator of all the times and experience. The art can't have another purpose that tries to find its perfection. That's why the critic helps it evoking people with social boundary. A novel without art is a simple barbarism. In his point of view; the treasure of the life is art. For example in Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895),

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

English poet. He was an objective poet, he prefers to know the act of man, and so he does the dramatic poetry. His poetry embraces a dramatic monologue. In his novels is ethical psychological and subconscious motif, so he restores the poetic form. For he the humanity is very close of it-self and his simpler novels can rebound in the structure of the moral world. In the incomprehension of this period, the poet became to remedy it. From 1841 to 1846, a series of poems under the title Bells and Pomegranates appeared, including "Pippa Passes,""My Last Duchess," and "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." His Dramatic Lyrics (1842) included "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845) included "How We Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." he wrote the prose narrative Dramatic Idylls (1879 and 1880) and Asolando

Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875-1926),

Austro-German poet and novelist, He came to Paris for the first time to do a monograph about the sculptor Rodin. Parish impress him with its poverty and sordidness. He found in the poetry a new dimension and a plastic art. In this case the poet works with the language, and the poem is the product, and it is a real attachment. He wrote about Cezanne too. He tries to don't mix up his feelings with the arts and amplifies the language. He says: ¨love to work¨. For he, the painters shouldn't have a conscientious ideas, whether deeper personal reflex ion. And he must be inside of the painter life to interpret him.

He subjects to the language to the task of being priced, and he undergoes itself to the task of not saying with that language what is, what he thinks neither what loves, but what you go. In that language, Rilke tries to give to the colors certain autonomy. What he manifests and he uses them mainly as noun, granting them a dimension of objects inside the syntax. In his intent to make more exact the description, however he cannot do without of the comparisons who unbalance the poetry in certain way and they grant him a more personal shade. His first published works were love poems, entitled Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs, 189 (The Book of Pictures, 1902; enlarged 1906) and by the verse series Poems from the Book of Hours (1905; trans. 1941), the Duino Elegies and wrote Sonnets to Orpheus (1923; trans. 1936).

Rimbaud, Arthur (1854-1891)

the precocious boy-poet of French symbolism, wrote some of the most remarkable poetry and prose of the 19th century. His highly suggestive, subtle work drew on subconscious sources, and his form was correspondingly supple and novel. Rimbaud has been identified as one of the creators of free verse because of the rhythmic experiments in his prose poems Illuminations (1886; Eng. trans., 1932). His Sonnet of the Vowels (1871; Eng. trans., 1966), in which each vowel is assigned a color, helped popularize synesthesia (the description of one sense experience in terms of another), a device widely exploited by the symbolists. The hallucinatory images in The Drunken Boat (1871; Eng. trans., 1952) and Rimbaud's urging, in Letter from the Seer (1871; Eng. trans., 1966), that poets become seers by undergoing a complete derangement of the senses, he also reveals as a precursor of surrealism. Following his own dictum, Rimbaud lived an inordinately intense, tortured existence that he described in A Season in Hell (1873; Eng. trans., 1932).

Debussy, Claude (1862-1918),

French composer The music of Debussy, in his phase of full maturity, was the precursor of most of the modern music and he transformed into one of the most important composers of final of the XIX century and beginnings of the XX one. His innovations were harmonic above everything. Although it was not him who invented the scale of whole tones, he is the first one that used it with success. His treatment of the chords was revolutionary, he used them of a colorist way, without appealing to them like support of any concrete tonality neither traditional progression. This lack of strict tonality produced a vague character that some contemporary critics described as musical impressionism, Debussy didn´t make a composition school, but he liberated to the music of the traditional harmonic limitations. Also, with his works it demonstrated the validity of the experimentation like method to get new ideas and technical. the String Quartet in G Minor (1893) and the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the After His most important works of this period include Estampes (Engravings, 1903), L'île joyeuse (The Isle of Joy, 1904), Images (two series, 1905 and 1907), and several preludes.noon of a Faun, 1894) Among Debussy's numerous other important works are the ballet score Jeux (Games, 1912), the orchestral poem La mer (The Sea, 1905), and the songs in Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire (Five Poems of Baudelaire, 1889

Ravel, Maurice (1875-1937),

French composer that exercised great influence in the music of the XX century. He often associates to that of the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy for his characteristics of harmony . However, Ravel felt a bigger attraction for the abstract musical structures. His vivid and transparent orchestral color transforms him into one of the modern teachers of the orchestration. Ravel's impressionistic leanings are uppermost in the demanding piano suites Miroirs (1905) and Gaspard de la nuit (1908) and in the Rhapsodie espagnole, for orchestra (1908). He was gifted at evoking past eras in works such as the "Pavane pour une infante défunte" (1899), "Valses nobles et sentimentales" (1911), and "Le Tombeau de Couperin" (1917), all for piano and later orchestrated. The shimmering, virtuosic texture of the piano piece "Jeux d'Eau" (Fountains, 1902) overlays a classical sonata structure. His classicism is also evident in the important String Quartet (1903), the Sonatina for piano (1905), and later chamber works such as the Sonata for Violin and Cello (1922). Ravel's stage works include the operas L'heure espagnole (1911) and L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Enchantments, 1925; libretto by the French writer Colette); the celebrated orchestral Boléro (1928), originally for solo dancer; and the evocative, impressionistic ballet Daphnis et Chloé (1912), commissioned by the Russian impresario Sergey Diaghilev, who also staged arrangements of earlier Ravel pieces such as the suite Ma Mere l'Oye (Mother Goose, 1910, for piano duet; orchestrated, 1912). Ravel's last major work was the Piano Concerto in D, for the left hand (1931), written for the Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961),