Frederick Bosley
Early 20th Century American Impressionist Figurative Drawings and Waterc...
Pencil, Paper
Early 20th Century American Impressionist Figurative Drawings and Waterc...
Paper, Pencil
Early 20th Century American Impressionist Animal Drawings and Watercolors
Paper, Pencil
1940s American Realist Still-life Paintings
Oil, Board
1940s American Impressionist Still-life Paintings
Linen, Oil
People Also Browsed
Antique 1880s Spanish Rococo Paintings
Canvas, Giltwood
Antique 1720s Chinese Chinoiserie Scholar's Objects
Ceramic
Early 20th Century French Paintings
Wood, Giltwood, Paint
Antique 19th Century English Paintings
Paint
Antique 19th Century French French Provincial Paintings
Canvas
Vintage 1910s French Belle Époque Paintings
Paint
Antique 17th Century Paintings
Copper
Antique Mid-19th Century American Paintings
Wood, Paint
Vintage 1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Beds and Bed Frames
Steel
Antique 19th Century English Victorian Paintings
Canvas, Wood, Giltwood, Paint
Antique Early 19th Century Danish Other Paintings
Canvas
Antique 19th Century Italian Paintings
Canvas
1890s Victorian Portrait Paintings
Oil
Early 20th Century Dutch Paintings
Canvas, Paint
Antique Mid-19th Century French Paintings
Early 2000s Australian Modern Paintings
Canvas, Acrylic
Recent Sales
1920s American Impressionist Interior Paintings
Oil, Board
20th Century Impressionist Figurative Paintings
Oil
A Close Look at impressionist Art
Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.
The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.
Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.
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