impressionnisme

On April 25, 1874, the journalist Louis Leroy attended a group exhibition at the Paris studio of photographer Félix Nadar and came away incensed. The show featured Monet, Renoir, Degas, and others who had rejected the official Salon's machinery. Leroy titled his satirical review 'Exhibition of the Impressionists,' borrowing from Monet's 1872 harbor painting 'Impression, soleil levant.' He intended the word as mockery: these painters offered only vague impressions, not finished pictures.

The word impression itself traced back through Old French to the Latin imprimere, meaning to press into or stamp, which already carried two senses in French by the seventeenth century: the physical mark left by pressure, and the fleeting mental sensation left by an experience. Monet, when he titled his harbor scene, was being factually honest about what the painting was. He had no idea he was naming a movement that would last a century.

The artists took up the label in 1877 for their third group show, stripping Leroy's contempt from it and turning it into a statement of method. Impressionnisme combined the suffix -isme, the standard French formation for doctrines and movements, with a word that already meant the transient and the felt. By 1880 the English term 'Impressionism' appeared in critical reviews, and by 1886, when the movement's work traveled to New York's National Academy galleries, American audiences used it as freely as Parisians did. The name that began as mockery had become a kind of manifesto.

What Leroy captured accidentally was a genuine principle. These painters held that the moment of seeing, not the object seen, was the true subject of a picture. Impression was not a failure of finish but the whole point. The word outlived its creator's contempt because it described, with surprising accuracy, exactly what the painters were doing.