Impressionism was named after a sneer at one small painting.
In 1874 Monet showed a hazy harbour at dawn and, stuck for a title, told the organisers to 'put Impression'. A critic mocked it, saying unfinished wallpaper looked more complete. The label he used for the group stuck. And the orange Sun in it is no brighter than the sky.
Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872 in Le Havre, his home town, as part of a series of views of the port at different times of day. In 2014, the astronomer Donald Olson and colleagues used the Sun's position, tide tables, weather records and the direction of the smoke to argue it shows the morning of 13 November 1872, at about 7:35 a.m.
In April 1874 it hung in a show in Paris by an independent group of about thirty artists, led by Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley; about 4,000 people came. Monet later recalled that he was asked for a catalogue title, and since it could hardly pass as a view of Le Havre, he said to put down 'Impression'.
The critic Louis Leroy seized on it. His review in the satirical paper Le Charivari, headlined 'The Exhibition of the Impressionists', imagined a traditional painter spluttering that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than this seascape. Leroy is often credited with coining the name, though the word 'impression' was already in use to describe paintings of the Barbizon School. The term, meant to deride, was quickly adopted by everyone, including the painters themselves.
The painting also plays a trick on the brain. The neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone has pointed out that the red-orange Sun has the same luminance as the grey sky around it, so in a black-and-white copy it almost vanishes. Part of our visual system registers only brightness, not colour, which may be why the Sun seems to shimmer. The painting was stolen from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris in 1985 and recovered five years later.
Source: Wikipedia — Impression, Sunrise · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
