Impressionism

Rue de la Bavole is an early 1864 work of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, depicting a simple street scene. The location is Rue de la Bavole, a street in The Port of Honfleur in Normandy, North West France. Monet uses a variety of dull colors and shadows, with the only real source of brightness […]

Edouard Manet’s French Impressionist painting Spring, interestingly enough, was the first work of art ever published in color. It uses the long artistic tradition of using a person to stand as representative of a place, thing, or phenomenon, i.e. allegorical figures. A year after its composition in 1881, the Paris Salon display ensured that Spring

The Grand Canal of Venice, also known as Blue Venice, shows as part of Edouard Manet’s transition from a precise style to a more Impressionist one. Painted in 1875, the brushwork is loose as everything other than the gondola seems to shine with immaterial light effects. The black of the gondola was a rare color

Here Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec paints a portrait of Suzanne Valadon, a fellow painter, in the autumn of 1885 in a woodland area. Valadon was the first female painter to be admitted to the Society of Beaux-Arts. She was also a prominent model for the Impressionists and appears in Renoir’s Dance at Bougival among many other

John Singer Sargent painted The Sketchers in 1914 on Lake Garda in Northern Italy and the luminous light of the picture relates the fascination of Italian light for generations of artists. Two of the artist’s friends, Wilfid de Glehn and Mary Foote, are shown at work on their canvases. John Singer Sargent’s The Sketchers is

Sunlight Sweet Coogee is an 1890 picture of the coastline and people at leisure in Coogee, a suburb of Sydney in Australia. Painted by Arthur Streeton, one of the leaders of the Australian Impressionist movement, its colours and tones are very fresh, a reminder of the cool coastal breeze. The picture is in a private

Gustave Caillebotte’s viewpoint here in his 1878 painting Man Docking his Skiff looks down on the subject-matter at a sharp angle. The gold shimmering light at the dock answers the effects of the water almost musically. French painter Caillebotte was 30 years of age when he painted this Impressionist work. Gustave Caillebotte’s Man Docking his

Claude Monet‘s Impressionist painting Poppies near Vétheuil contains three people in a richly coloured poppy field here that seems to shimmer. One of the figures – in the centre foreground – is thought to be Monet’s new partner Alice. This was painted in 1879 after Monet moved to Vétheuil in North-West France after the death

Little Irene is an 1880 portrait painting by leading French Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Analysis of Little Irene Little Irene was commissioned by the father of the sitter, French banker Louis Cahen d’Anvers and painted by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s self-portrait in 1880. He painted the eight-year-old with a certain ponderousness in his own version

The Fair in Dieppe, Sunny Morning is in the Impressionist style Camille Pissarro pioneered, with blobs of paint acting as people. However he shows a concern with architectural detail also, as in the flying buttresses of the cathedral on the left. It was painted in 1901 in Dieppe, a fishing port in Normandy, Northern France. Camille

Breakfast in the Studio reveals Edouard Manet’s earlier (1868) concerns with detail, relative precision of line, and the careful rendering of light on different surfaces. The boy at the center is Léon Leenhoff, son of Suzanne who became Manet’s wife. Edouard Manet’s Breakfast in the Studio is in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Oarsmen at Chatou is a brightly colored scene of a woman and three men, one in a canoe, in the foreground of a setting half-rural and half-suburban. Renoir’s style here – placing small dashes of different colors alongside each other – is reminiscent but stops short of pointillism and makes the entire picture

The young woman reading an illustrated journal that we are observing here in this Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting is completely immersed and unaware of us. The silence of her reading contrasts with the shock of her red hair which is exploited in a typical Impressionist style by French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He painted this in France in

Rooftops in the Snow is an 1878 scene of Montmartre in Paris, depicted from a high viewpoint by French artist Gustave Caillebotte. The Impressionist cityscape is notable for its architectural details and the restricted color palette – other than the snow, the painting is largely black and grey. The picture, titled “Vue de toits” in

This 1880 painting of Madame Renoir with a Dog shows Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s wife seated with her pet in a setting of lush vegetation. Thick brushwork and use of the palette knife all over the canvas embeds the woman and dog in the landscape, a point emphasized by the flowers in Madame’s hat. They are only distinguishable

The Road from Versailles to Louveciennes between town and country is a social document by the French Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. A worker draws a cart after him, symbolizing rural life. Preceding him, perhaps rushing ahead, is a bourgeois gentleman in a top hat. Sisley regularly painted Roads, bridges, and Waterways. The image shows a

The Print Lover Honore Daumier shows a potential member of his target market examining prints, a medium for which Daumier was famous. Painted loosely with rasping technique, the image captures an essence rather than a realistic likeness. This was painted in 1860 at a time when Daumier was well renowned for his cartoons, paintings, sculptures

Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise is an 1875 painting in the Impressionist style by the leading French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The painting depicts three diners, a woman and two men, in varying states of consciousness on the Seine’s Ile de Grand Jatte. The man on the right is smoking, and he is in the middle

Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood is a double-tribute to the father of Impressionism and the en-plein-air style of painting. Created by John Singer Sargent in 1885, ten years after the two first met, this work portrays Renoir at work painting outdoors with his second wife Camille Doncieux sitting behind him. John Singer

A Young Girl with Daisies is an 1889 painting in the Impressionist style by the leading French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In this picture, we can see in clear and Realist tones and likeness of a young girl that is painted with precision. This is quite a contrast to the landscape in the background of the