Impressionism is revolutionary 1870s french movement capturing light and momentary sensation.
Impressionism emerged from a group of Paris-based painters who held their first independent exhibition in 1874, deliberately outside the official Salon system. Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas developed a shared commitment to painting sensory experience — light as it falls in a particular instant, colour as it appears in the open air, movement arrested in a fraction of a second. The critic Louis Leroy coined 'Impressionism' as a mockery of Monet's Impression, Sunrise — the artists adopted the name defiantly. Their innovations: painting in full daylight from observation, using unmixed colour directly from the tube, accepting visible brushwork rather than disguising it. The movement transformed Western art and directly generated Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and everything that followed. The group's targets were the Academy's insistence on mythological subjects, dark studio palettes, and smooth, invisible brushwork — Impressionists painted outdoors (en plein air), used visible, broken strokes of pure color placed side by side, and chased the fleeting effects of light at a specific hour rather than an idealized, timeless scene. Monet's cycles — the same haystack or Rouen Cathedral façade painted dozens of times at different hours — turned this into a systematic investigation of light itself as the true subject. Critics were savage: one reviewer, mocking Monet's 'Impression, Sunrise,' coined the term as an insult, and the painters adopted it as their own. By the 1880s the group had splintered into different directions — Renoir toward classical form, Pissarro toward Neo-Impressionist dots, Degas toward pastel and the human figure in motion — but the core idea outlived the movement: that perception itself, not the object perceived, is the proper subject of painting. That idea runs directly into Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and eventually abstraction. Impressionism is also the movement that made painting outdoors, quickly, and in series a legitimate professional practice rather than a mere study for a 'finished' studio work — a shift in working method as consequential as the visual style itself.