# Impressionism — A Gallery Deck Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-impressionism Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-impressionism/raw Category: Art Slides: 13 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:56:04.679Z Tags: catalog, art, impressionism ## Summary Painting light, 1872–1886 Key sections include: Impressionism; Breaking with the Academy; 1874: The First Exhibition; A New Way of Painting; Claude Monet; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Edgar Degas; Berthe Morisot; Camille Pissarro; Mary Cassatt. ## Slide Outline 1. Impressionism 2. Breaking with the Academy 3. 1874: The First Exhibition 4. A New Way of Painting 5. Claude Monet 6. Pierre-Auguste Renoir 7. Edgar Degas 8. Berthe Morisot 9. Camille Pissarro 10. Mary Cassatt 11. After Impressionism 12. Why It Matters 13. Go See Them in the Flesh ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: Impressionism - Special Exhibition - Painting light, 1872–1886 - A thirteen-room walk through the revolution in seeing. ### Slide 2: Breaking with the Academy - Room I · The Refusal - In nineteenth-century Paris, the Salon was the only door to a painter's career. A jury of academicians decided what counted as art: polished surfaces, mythological scenes, idealized bodies. To be rejected was to be invisible. - In 1863, after an unusually harsh culling, Napoleon III permitted the rejected works their own show: the Salon des Refusés. Crowds came to laugh. They left arguing. - Manet's Olympia stared back at the viewer — a modern woman, not a goddess — and the floor of French painting cracked. - Salon des Refusés - Palais de l'Industrie, 1863 - Édouard Manet - Olympia, 1863 (exhibited 1865) ### Slide 3: 1874: The First Exhibition - Room II · A Name from a Sneer - Thirty artists, weary of waiting on juries, mounted their own show in the photographer Nadar's old studio at 35 boulevard des Capucines. Among them: Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, Cézanne. - A critic seized on Monet's harbor scene Impression, soleil levant and mocked the lot of them as “Impressionists.” The insult stuck. The painters wore it like a medal. - Eight group exhibitions followed, the last in 1886. - After Monet · Impression, Sunrise, 1872 ### Slide 4: A New Way of Painting - Room III · Method - Broken color. Pure pigments laid side by side, mixed by the eye, not on the palette. - Visible brushstrokes. The mark is not hidden — it is the picture. - Plein-air. Painting outdoors, chasing the actual light of an actual hour. - Portable paint tubes (1841, John Goffe Rand) made the easel mobile for the first time. - Modern subject. Boulevards, train stations, regattas, lunch — the life around them. ### Slide 5: Claude Monet - Room IV · Monet - 1840 – 1926 - Monet painted the same haystack at dawn, at noon, in fog, in snow — not because the haystack mattered, but because the light on it never stopped changing. He stacked easels in the field and rotated through them by the clock. - Later he repeated the trick on Rouen Cathedral's facade and on the lily pond he engineered at his house in Giverny. Painting, for him, became time made visible. - Haystacks - 1890–91, 25 canvases - Rouen Cathedral - 1892–94, 30+ canvases - Water Lilies - 1896–1926 - Giverny garden - 1883 onward - After Monet · Meule, 1891 ### Slide 6: Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Room V · Renoir - 1841 – 1919 - Where Monet painted weather, Renoir painted people — Sunday-afternoon people, dappled by leaf-light, a little flushed with wine. Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) is his masterpiece: a Montmartre dance hall full of friends, all flickering circles of pink and blue. - “Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.” - Renoir made the case that beauty was a serious subject. Critics complained the figures dissolved into spots of light. That was the point. ### Slide 7: Edgar Degas - Room VI · Degas - 1834 – 1917 - Degas refused the label “Impressionist” even as he organized their shows. He painted indoors, in studios, in lamplight. But he shared their obsession: a world caught mid-gesture. - Ballet rehearsals seen from the wings. Jockeys at the start. Women bathing, towel mid-arc. He cropped his canvases like photographs — a foot leaving the frame, a face cut by a fan — decades before that was a thing. - “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” - After Degas · The Dance Class, c.1874 ### Slide 8: Berthe Morisot - Room VII · Morisot - 1841 – 1895 - Morisot was the first woman to join the Impressionists, and she showed in seven of their eight exhibitions — missing only the year she gave birth. She painted what was open to her: nurseries, gardens, dressing rooms, the ordinary daylight of a woman's afternoon. - Her brush is faster and more nervous than Monet's, almost shorthand. She makes domestic life look like the most temporary thing in the world — which it is. - “It is important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.” ### Slide 9: Camille Pissarro - Room VIII · Pissarro - 1830 – 1903 - The eldest of the group, and the only one to show in all eight exhibitions. Cézanne called him “a father to me.” Gauguin learned from him. Even the young Seurat owed him. - Pissarro painted orchards in Pontoise, peasants bent over rows, then later the rain-slicked boulevards of Paris from a hotel window — the same patient eye, just turned to traffic. - Mentor to a generation — held the movement together socially. - Anarchist, Jewish immigrant, deeply political — the only Impressionist who put labor at the center. - Late-career experiments with Pointillism (1885–90) before returning to looser handling. ### Slide 10: Mary Cassatt - Room IX · Cassatt - 1844 – 1926 - Born in Pennsylvania, Cassatt moved to Paris and became, in Degas' words, someone who “feels as I do.” She joined the Impressionists in 1879 and is the great American voice in the movement. - Her subject was the inner life of women and children — not sentimental, but watchful: a mother holding a sleeping baby with the seriousness of someone holding a candle in the wind. Her later prints, influenced by Japanese woodblocks, are among the finest of the century. - She also quietly persuaded wealthy American collectors to buy Impressionist work — the reason so much of it lives in U.S. museums today. ### Slide 11: After Impressionism - Room X · What Came Next - By the mid-1880s the original group was drifting apart. The doors they had pried open let through a stranger, fiercer generation. - Paul Cézanne — rebuilt the picture from cylinders, spheres, cones; the bridge to Cubism. - Georges Seurat — took broken color to its logical end: a grid of dots, painted by science. - Vincent van Gogh — took the brushstroke and made it scream. - Paul Gauguin — abandoned Europe entirely, in search of color uncolored by habit. - Each had been a student of the Impressionist lesson. Each pushed it somewhere it had not planned to go. ### Slide 12: Why It Matters - Room XI · The Lesson - Before the Impressionists, a painting was usually about something — a battle, a saint, a story you could tell at dinner. After them, a painting could simply be a record of a moment of seeing, and that was enough. - They moved painting from narrative to perception — from what the world means to what the world looks like, exactly here, exactly now. - Every modern movement that followed — Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, abstraction, even photography's self-understanding — begins from the door these painters kicked open in a borrowed studio in 1874. ### Slide 13: Go See Them in the Flesh - End of Exhibition - No reproduction shows the brushstroke. The crust of paint, the way a stroke of poppy red sits up off the canvas next to a smear of cobalt — that part is in the room with the painting. Go. - Musée d'Orsay - Paris — the great Impressionist hall - Musée Marmottan Monet - Paris — Impression, Sunrise - The Met & MoMA - New York - Art Institute of Chicago - Caillebotte, Seurat, Monet - Further Viewing - youtube.com/results?search_query=monet+impressionism - youtube.com/results?search_query=musee+d+orsay+impressionism - — End of Gallery III — ## Related Decks - [Architecture / a brief structural history](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-architecture) - [CINEMA — 125 Years of Moving Images](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-cinema) - [Design / 130 Years of Movements](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-design-movements) - [World Literature — Stories Across Continents](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-art-literature)