The critics thought it was absurd to sell paintings that looked like slap-dash impressions and to present these paintings as finished works. Normally, an artist’s “impressions” were not meant to be sold, but were meant to be aids for the memory-to take these ideas back to the studio for the masterpiece on canvas. The Impressionists’ completed works looked like sketches, fast and preliminary “impressions” that artists would dash off to preserve an idea of what to paint more carefully at a later date. The paintings of Neoclassical and Romantic artists had a finished appearance. They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it.īerte Morisot, The Cradle, 1872, oil on canvas, 56 x 46 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions was too long. The artists we know today as Impressionists-Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley (and several others)-could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury-which could often be quite arbitrary. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reputation and make a living as an artist). This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition-called the Salon-and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This painting was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris).
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