IMPRESSIONISM

One of the best loved of all paintings is the name given to a movement which started in Florence and spread to other countries in the 2nd half of the 19th century. It was a real revolution in painting. The method was to reproduce an impression exactly as it is experienced without pothering rules. The impression painted the doors using a technique of separate fragmented brush strokes and pore clear colors. They aimed at rendering changing effects of light and shadow with intensity.

For instance one can think of a venation Renaissance painter trying to express reality as it actually was and using brilliant hues and complementary colors. Then Spanish painter Greco, Valazquez, Goya expressed their new tendencies to an even greater extent. Indeed Manet and Renior were very strongly influenced by their works.

Impressionism is the way it seizes on the living on the living luminous moments leaving gaps between the brush strokes. Painting in the open air or using only primary colors were not considered important and black was freely used.

At about the same period in Flanders, Rubens was painting shadows that were transparent and full of colors .Rubens never used black for shadow and here he was at one with the impressionists. The English school o painters played an important part in the evolution of French painting as it developed towards impressionism. During the war of 1870 Monet, Sisley, Pissaro went to London to study the work of the great English landscape artist, Turner and contable.

Monet was the first artist for the new revolutionary tendencies in art but actually it was only a year or two later after the war. Manet persuaded him to start painting out of door himself an independent painter not belonging to any particular school.

Impressionism is considered as a new kind of painting following on new kind of vision. The impressionist painters no longer represent form and colors as they believed to be but they actually saw them under the putting effect of light. This led them to give up several of the traditional principal of art. Clear contours to outline shapes and suggest volume were rejected and single broken touches strokes were adopted instead. Perspective on the rules of geometry was no longer used but instead graded tones and Tints were used to define space and volume working from the foreground to the horizon.

An impressionist painter is a modernist painter. Impressionist painting which was so much disliked hen it first appeared has been fashionable now for something like 50 years. It is important to realize now that how several painters who belong to the impressionist group soon came to see short coming in new style of painting although they were far away from many great qualities and value. But it was Cezanne who reacted most strongly against impressionism and with him started the Neo-Impressionism.

Then there were several other artists connected with both impressionist and Neo-Impressionist moment. It is interesting to notice that whatever the reason whether direct influence or inventible swing of the extraordinary fertile and productive period. Nabism, favism and cubism as well as art of independent painters. It all shows the richness of French paintings.

The important artists of impressionism are as following:-
1. Manet.
2. Monet.
3. Pissario.
4. Sisley.
5. Degas.
6. Renior.
7. Turner.