Arriving at the NCPA a day after its world premiere, Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874, a documentary made in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., celebrates the 150th anniversary of the radical art movement and dives deep into the lives and works of the Impressionists.
By Ornella D’Souza
In 1874, France was finding its feet after being defeated in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) in which Napoleon III had been captured, leading to the collapse of the Second Empire in France. The Paris Commune, an insurrection by a popular faction of the government, was short-lived. The Third Republic, a period in which France would gradually become a democratic parliamentary republic, was first proclaimed in 1870 and would, until the Second World War, mark a period of relative stability in a country that had been in a constant state of flux for a long time.
This post-war climate proved to be a catalyst for French artists to gain new perspectives into their art practices. At the time, the government-run École des Beaux-Arts not only had the final word on what kind of art was acceptable but had also become deeply conservative. It only approved artworks that adhered to Neoclassicism (which began in Europe in the 1750s and revived Greco-Roman ideas of classical antiquity) and Romanticism (a mid-19th century movement that celebrated individual imagination, emotionalism and intuition over intellectualism).
On 15th April 1874, an art show titled Hungry for Independence, funded and mounted by the 31 participating artists themselves, was held at a three storey studio on 35 Boulevard des Capucines. It belonged to Félix Nadar, the multifaceted maverick who pioneered aerial photography from a hot-air balloon. The show was by a ‘joint-stock company’ with a very long name—Société Anonyme Coopérative d’Artistes-Peintres, Sculpteurs, etc. (Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers). The purpose of these Société Anonyme artists was to snub the stakeholders of the stringent academic styles of art who had, in the first place, snubbed them. This collective grudge stemmed from the rejection of their avant-garde artworks for the 1863 edition of the Paris Salon, an annual exhibition that displayed artworks that were in alignment with the conservative tones of the event sponsor, the École des Beaux-Arts. To quell the uproar, the then Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, allowed these artists to have a new show titled Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) to showcase their rejected artworks.
Visitors attended the Salon des Refusés only to laugh and mock at the displayed art. The butt of most jokes was the now-famous painting ‘Luncheon on the Grass’ by an obscure artist named Édouard Manet shown at the first Refusés edition in 1863. It stoked controversy because Manet placed a naked woman with two fully clothed men, picnicking in a forest. Moreover, the work did not meet the rules for nude art and so, was rejected by the official Paris Salon.
When petitions for subsequent Salon des Refusés editions were denied in 1867 and 1872, the rejected artists banded under Claude Monet and formed the aforementioned Société Anonyme in 1873. Many of them belonged to the Batignolles group of avant garde artists, who hailed from the eponymous French district, and regularly convened between 1869 and 1875 to exchange notes on finding new approaches to their artistic styles and techniques, and oppose the dominant Romanticism. This core of ‘rejects’ consisted of Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Armand Guillaumin and the only woman among them, Berthe Morisot. All the artists were in the formative stages of their careers, and mostly penniless. Cézanne and Pissarro met at the Académie Suisse in Paris. Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Frédéric Bazille studied painting together under Swiss academic artist Charles Gleyre. The advent of railroads facilitated quick travel to faroff lands and thus boosted the en plein air (French for ‘in the open air’) movement which enabled artists to ditch the studio space and paint in nature. Inspired by the Barbizon school of senior artists who practised Realism—Théodore Rousseau, Charles-François Daubigny, Jules Dupré, Manet, Degas—and painted at the scenic Forest of Fontainebleau, the four Gleyre students also visited the forest in 1864, to capture the fleeting movements and effects of light on their desired subjects.
The first exhibition
At the 1874 exhibition at Nadar’s studio, visitors were confounded by these ‘peculiar’ paintings. All of them looked unfinished, blurry to varying degrees, with no fixed outlines and thin, short and hurried brushstrokes that appeared like splinters. A section of these works bore stylistic elements like asymmetrical compositions and vivid colours from Japanese wood prints called Ukiyo-e that had just entered the European markets. Many of the artists had used readymade synthetic pigments, which offered unconventional shades for the times such as chrome yellow and ultramarine, which brightened their works. Their availability in portable containers allowed the artists to carry them along on their en plein air escapades and save on time they would have spent making colours from scratch.
Most of the works, however, seemed ‘too bright’ for the times, in particular ‘Impression, Sunrise’, completed in 1872-73 by Monet, which showed a view of the port of Le Havre from his hotel window in Normandy. A tiny blob of bright orange sun casting reflections in the cold blues and greys of the water and sky, the horizon indiscernible, dotted with tall, masted ships and chimneys. Monet used the word ‘Impression’ in the painting title only after he was prodded for the purpose of listing the artwork in the catalogue.
On 25th April, Le Charivari, an illustrated satirical magazine, published a review of the exhibition by art critic Louis Leroy titled ‘L’Exposition des impressionnistes’ (The Exhibition of the Impressionists). Leroy wrote the review as a dialogue between two fictional viewers, in which one of them exclaims: “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! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.” In his attempt to sound cheeky, Leroy had perhaps completely overlooked the sociopolitical undertones that Monet tried to demonstrate in the artwork. Art historian Paul Hayes Tucker in his seminal book Claude Monet: Life & Art (1995) felt that the painter had juxtaposed steamboats and cranes with fishermen in a rudimentary canoe, as a comment on the surge of commercialisation in France post the Franco-Prussian War. “For while it is a poem of light and atmosphere, the painting can also be seen as an ode to the power and beauty of a revitalised France,” wrote Tucker.
Instead of buckling under Leroy’s insult, the 31 artists, all feisty young rebels, turned the tables on Leroy and the sniggering public, by identifying with the word ‘Impression’ as their self-attested revolutionary way of seeing. That 1874 show formally birthed Impressionism, with Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ as its mascot, and Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Guillaumin, Morisot and Monet as the faces of the movement.
Each artist applied Impressionist techniques and materials to paint individual themes, and in some cases, drastically different from the way they were usually painted. Manet created nudes, scenes from Parisian bars and cafés and even social outcasts like beggars and ragpickers. Pissarro captured the various moods and seasons of peasants and their farmlands.
Degas used artificial light and odd angles to tap into the lives of ballet dancers, prostitutes and singers. Renoir used short brushstrokes and a play of light and shadows to create vibrance in his portrayals of welldressed and middle-class Parisians. Morisot’s works are important from a feminist lens, as they portray a changing society with women taking on various roles and duties or simply unwinding for the day. Monet produced all kinds of landscapes and progressed to painting his now iconic large-than-life water lily ponds.
Impressionism defied the very custodians of art who dismissed artistic experiments different from the acceptable norm, but now qualifies as one of the most important art styles, along with Realism, Expressionism and abstract art. With time, Impressionism paved the way for numerous other movements, such as Post-Impressionism (headlined by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat), Fauvism, abstract Expressionism, Dadaism and beyond. Even today, its impact lingers on.
A lasting impression
In 1985, nine Impressionist paintings, which included Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’, were stolen by a Franco-Japanese art syndicate from its current abode, the Musée Marmottan Monet, which holds the world’s largest collection of Monet paintings. They were found five years later at a villa in Corsica. While the Monet painting was sold in 1874 for only 800 francs, today it is estimated to be worth 250 to 350 million dollars.
In 1974, Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition was co-hosted by the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate 100 years since the first Impressionist exhibition, showing 42 iconic works painted between 1860 and the late 1880s. At the 150th anniversary in 2024, a commemorative exhibition travelled to each of the organisers’ venues, Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and displayed 130 Impressionist artworks.
And now, Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874, a documentary produced in close collaboration with Musée d’Orsay and the NGA, will premiere in cinemas on 18th March 2025 and will be screened the very next day at the NCPA. The 90-minute film is directed by Ali Ray, a UK-based filmmaker, writer and development producer, whose previous work includes documentaries like Frida Kahlo (2020) and Klimt & The Kiss (2023). Dawn of Impressionism: Paris 1874 is pieced together using first-person accounts of artists, writers and journalists of Paris who were present when Impressionism was unleashed upon the world in 1874. In a statement, Ray has said, “Having read the letters and diary entries of the artists that created the works and also the critics’ reviews after seeing them for the first time during the month-long exhibition, I feel closer to these incredible works and the people who created them. I also feel very differently about these works now compared to how I felt when I had only read modern day commentaries.”
This article was originally published in the March 2025 issue of ON Stage.
