A 19th-century French movement built on broken brushwork, plein-air painting, and a fascination with the changing qualities of light. Impressionism was born partly as a rebellion against the official Salon, whose juries kept rejecting work that did not look 'finished' in the academic sense. The breakaway artists — Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, Degas, Caillebotte and others — organized their own exhibitions starting in 1874, where a critic ridiculed Monet's Impression, Sunrise and accidentally named the movement. The painters worked outdoors when they could, racing the sun to catch the way light fell on a haystack, a riverbank or a railway station, and they rejected the smooth surface of academic painting in favor of visible, broken strokes that admitted the painter's own hand. Subjects shifted from history and myth to everyday modern life: cafés, boulevards, train stations, suburban gardens. By the late 1880s the original group was scattering and a younger generation — Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin — was already pushing the language somewhere new.
