Text Size + –

What is Impressionism?

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.

The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media, which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

Source: This page uses material from the Wikipedia article 'Impressionism'. Its content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.