In April 1874, about thirty painters in Paris stopped asking permission. The official Salon — the state-run exhibition that decided who was a real artist — kept rejecting their work, so they formed a cooperative with a deliberately dull name, the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, rented the former studio of the photographer Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, and hung a show of their own. It lost money.
What it didn’t lose was the argument. It just took a hostile review to name the winning side.
Among the canvases was a harbor view Claude Monet had painted two years earlier at Le Havre: a red sun smudged through morning mist, a few boats suggested with dabs of paint, water built out of short strokes of blue and orange. Monet had titled it Impression, Sunrise — “impression” being studio shorthand for a quick sketch, something not meant to be a finished picture.
And Monet’s canvas wasn’t the only offender in the room. Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Cézanne — the walls were full of the same offense: bright, unmixed color laid on in short, visible strokes; ordinary modern scenes instead of history and mythology; shadows painted in color rather than gray. The academic standard was a smooth, invisible finish, and this work didn’t even pretend to it. The painters were chasing an effect of light at one particular moment, and light doesn’t wait for you to blend. To most critics it looked like sketches that had escaped the studio. The insult was ready to be made, and one critic made it.
The critic Louis Leroy reviewed the show for the satirical paper Le Charivari on April 25, 1874, and he wrote his review as a little dialogue with an old-fashioned painter friend walking the rooms in horror. Monet’s seascape is where the friend finally cracks:
“Impression — I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it… and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.”
Leroy titled the piece “Exhibition of the Impressionists.” He meant it as a sneer: these weren’t painters, they were impressionists, daubers of half-finished sketches. The word was picked up, repeated, and — this is the part I enjoy — adopted. By their third exhibition in 1877, the painters were using “Impressionist” themselves. They held eight exhibitions in all, through 1886, under a name that began as a joke at their expense.
The joke has now been running for a hundred and fifty years. The sketchy harbor view hangs in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, and the word Leroy invented to swat it sits over the doors of museum galleries all over the world, printed in the kind of sober lettering museums use for things beyond argument.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere about bad reviews. The critic got his column. The painters got the dictionary.
Read more
- On the movement and the 1874 show: Impressionism: Art and Modernity — The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
- On the painters, the Salon, and the name: Impressionism — Encyclopaedia Britannica