The style of impressionist painting has several characteristic features. To achieve the appearance of spontaneity, impressionist painters used broken brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colors. This practice produced loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the carefully blended colors and smooth surfaces favored by most artists of the time. The colors in impressionist paintings have an overall luminosity because the painters avoided blacks and earth colors. The impressionists also simplified their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a striking overall effect.

The impressionists held seven subsequent exhibitions between 1876 and 1886. What united this group was not style so much as a desire to gain independence from an annual government-sponsored exhibition in Paris called the Salon. To exhibit at the Salon, artists were required to submit work to a jury that applied outmoded standards in deciding which works were acceptable. Although most of the impressionists previously had work accepted by the Salon, they had also experienced rejection. They were especially indignant at the humiliating way in which the Salon had responded to the work of fellow painter Édouard Manet.

Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was rejected by the official Salon of 1863, but shown instead at a special exhibition of rejected paintings (called the Salon des Refusés) in 1863. Critics responded with outrage to this painting, which shows two men clothed in contemporary dress seated at a picnic with a naked woman. At the time, nudes were an acceptable subject in allegorical or historical paintings, but not in scenes of everyday life. In fact, Manet had borrowed his composition from Italian Renaissance sources and reworked it in pointedly modern ways.

The critics’ hostility toward Manet made him a hero to the younger generation of painters, who rallied round him. Manet provided the link between most of the artists who took part in the first impressionist exhibition, and in turn he responded to the innovations of the impressionists, particularly to the work of Monet. However Manet never joined forces with the new group, because he still regarded acceptance by the Salon as the true test of a painter’s reputation.

Despite its negative associations, the name impressionist stuck, and helped give both critics and the artists themselves a sense of joint purpose. In 1877 a short-lived journal entitled L’Impressioniste was published to coincide with the third exhibition held by this group; its purpose was to champion the artists and defend them against critical attack.

Critics and historians have defined the impressionist style in various ways over time, and have reordered the importance assigned to individual impressionist artists. For the first historians of the movement, the landscapes of Monet, Sisley, and Renoir represented impressionism in its purest form. Their technique of applying paint in small dabs perfectly captured the flickering quality of sunlight, especially its reflections on water. Art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who worked hard to sell impressionist works, promoted this view of impressionism as a movement concerned primarily with landscape painting, with Monet as its central figure. Art historians tended to overlook the work of Morisot despite her similar technique and participation in the original 1874 exhibition—partly because she was a woman and partly because she had fewer works in circulation than the others. For years Monet’s reputation overshadowed that of Pissarro, whose paintings offer a more solid, structured view of nature in rural France, seen for instance in Market Garden at l’Hermitage, Pontoise (1879, Musée d’Orsay). Since about 1980, art historians have increasingly recognized Pissarro’s importance as the movement’s most loyal exhibitor and most influential teacher. Similarly, historians have focused renewed attention on the immense achievements in figure painting of Degas, Renoir, American expatriate Mary Cassatt, and Gustave Caillebotte.

Many of the practices and objectives of the impressionists had precedents in earlier French painting of the 19th century. Most of the impressionists shared a belief in painting the unembellished truth of what they saw, and in this concern for realism they followed the tendencies of earlier French realists such as

 Gustave Courbet. They emulated French painter Camille Corot in his sensitivity to the effects of light in nature. They also learned from French landscape painters of the Barbizon School, many of whom practiced outdoor painting. Especially influential in their practice of painting in the open air were French painter

In seeking to capture the luminous effects of sunlight, the impressionists used light colors and applied them onto a light or white ground (the canvas’s initial coat) rather than the darker ground that was then conventional. The impressionists worked quickly to preserve a feeling of spontaneity and directness. They often painted one color on top of another that was still wet, a practice that tends to blur contours and soften forms.

Scientific advances helped the impressionists. The new availability of oil paint in metal tubes made painting out of doors much easier, and new paints based on artificial pigments provided brighter colors, particularly blues, yellows, and greens. The impressionists also put into practice new scientific theories about color: To enhance the intensity of colors in their paintings, they avoided black or earth colors for depicting shadows and substituted complementary colors. So, for instance, the shadowed underside of a red apple would be dappled with shades of green.

The impressionist group began to break up during the 1880s. Even Monet departed from his direct approach to nature in his late style. Instead of painting a passing scene in a single sitting, Monet began to examine the ways a single large-scale subject responded to changing light. In several series of paintings—of haystacks near his home, for instance, and of the west façade of the cathedral at Rouen—he showed the same subject in different seasons or at different times of day. Unlike his earlier work, these paintings were finished in the studio.

Although the Académie and conservative critics had initially greeted the innovations of the impressionists with hostility, sympathetic critics encouraged the painters, and a select few patrons bought their work. By the 1890s impressionist paintings began to attract more buyers. Impressionism appealed mainly to newly rich middle-class collectors, who brought fewer prejudices to new art than did members of the establishment. These collectors also responded to the small scale and ready comprehensibility of impressionist paintings. Impressionism caught on quickly in America from the 1880s onward. The ground had been prepared by American painters who became sympathetic to the style while living in France. They included Cassatt, who exhibited with the impressionists, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. Artists in other countries were just as quick to catch on: British painter Walter Sickert, Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, and German painter Max Liebermann all adopted aspects of impressionism and helped popularize the style back home.