How to make an Impression

In 1874, a group of painters rejected by the official Paris Salon staged its own show and changed the course of art. It was France's convulsed lurch into the modern era that helped spark the Impressionist revolution

- Carla Passino

ON April 15, 1874, a blazing orange sun rising over the port of Le Havre freed a fishing boat from the dull vestiges of the dying night and French art from the staid shackles of the Salon’s lifeless academia. Claude Monet’s Impression: Soleil Levant lent its name to the new, revolutionary approach to painting that was presented on that April day: Impressionism.

Exactly how different this style—full of loose brushstrokes and preoccupied with light—was from the rigid artistic traditions of the past emerges clearly from the Musée d’Orsay’s newly opened ‘Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism’ exhibition in the French capi- tal, which presents a selection of the works exhibited in April 1874 next to paintings from the Salon of that time. Nonetheless, the Anonymous society of painters, sculptors, and printmakers, as the group of 31 artists behind the first Impressionist exhibition called themselves, hadn’t initially set out to stage an artistic rebellion: ‘They wanted to exhibit, couldn’t exhibit in the official Salon and, therefore, found a way to create their own platform; but the fact that they did it was revolutionary,’ believes art dealer David Stern of Stern Pissarro. He is married to the greatgrand-daughter of Camille Pissarro, artist Lélia Pissarro and, therefore, has both professional and familial ties with the move- ment, whose inaugural show he will commemorate with an exhibition, ‘Celebrating 150 years of Impressionism’, featuring works by Pissarro, Sisley, Degas and Renoir.