The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay
Exhibition themes: Towards Impressionism
'The Impressionists' were officially formed as an entity on 27 December 1873, when the original core group of around sixteen Impressionist artists (the exact number differs in varying accounts), frustrated at their lack of success within the government-sponsored Salon system, and by the lack of alternative exhibition opportunities in Paris, resolved to form the Société anonyme coopérative d'artistes - peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. (Co-operative Company of Artists - Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.). This act led a few months later, on 15 April 1874 (two weeks before the annual opening of the official Salon), to the staging of the first 'Impressionist' exhibition at 35 boulevard des Capucines, Paris. It was at this exhibition that the term Impressionism was first coined for the new art movement in a flurry of articles by various art critics of the day. Jules Antoine Castagnary, for example, wrote that: 'They are impressionists in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape'.
Today the name of this great art movement may seem more immediately synonymous with landscape painting, especially paintings created directly before nature in the open air (en plein air). In the 1870s and 1880s, however, the Impressionists were equally readily associated with the startling new documentation of the experience of modern life, to which the human figure was absolutely central. Whether painting the dance halls and theatres of Paris, or the rural surrounds of the capital to which Parisians escaped for leisure and quietude, the Impressionists shared an art that exemplified what the critic Edmond Duranty called in 1876 La Nouvelle Peinture (The New Painting), one of whose core principles, he had argued, was 'to eliminate the partition separating the artist's studio from everyday life'.
Between 1874 and 1886 the original founders of Impressionism, such as Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro, organized eight group Impressionist exhibitions in Paris. These events were not always harmonious, being often marred by infighting amongst the exhibiting artists.
