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Definition: IMPRESSIONISM from Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms

An important movement in French, and latterly modern, art in the late nineteenth century. Impressionism rejected the ‘salon’ art of the establishment and committed itself to the pictorial depiction of immediate impressions in all their evanescence and luminosity (hence the description of ‘plein air’ painting). Of all the avant-gardes, Impressionism is the first to explicitly address the problem of representing the fleeting effects of light (the great exponents being Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat). Its musical parallel is best represented by the ‘tone paintings’ of Claude Debussy (1862-1918).


Impressionism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had enormous influence in European and North American painting in the late 19th century. The Impressionists wanted to depict real life, to paint straight from nature, and to capture the changing effects of light. The term was first used abusively to describe Claude Monet 's painting Impression: Sunrise (1872). The other leading Impressionists included Paul Cézanne , Edgar Degas , Edouard Manet , Camille Pissarro , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , and Alfred Sisley , but only Monet remained devoted to Impressionist ideas throughout his career. The core of the Impressionist group was formed in the early 1860s by Monet, Renoir, and Sisley, who met as students and enjoyed painting in the open air – one of the hallmarks of Impressionism. They met other members of the Impressionist circle through Paris café society. They never made up a formal group, but they organized eight group exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, at the first of which…
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Full text Article IMPRESSIONISM

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Impressionism as a term related to poetry owes its existence to a poetic ambition, prevalent roughly between 1890 and 1910, inspired by the visual arts and focused on achieving ever neater verbal subtlety and nuances in poems, novellas, and lyrical, mainly one-act, plays. It exemplified the Horatian…
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Full text Article Impressionism

From Philip's Encyclopedia
French anti-academic art movement of the late 19th century, gaining its name from a painting by Monet entitled Impression, Sunrise (1874). Impressionists aimed to create 'a spontaneous work rather than a calculated one'. In the 1860s, Monet, Renoir , Sisley and Frédéric Bazille explored the…
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Full text Article Impressionism

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Movement in art that developed in France in the late 19th century. In painting it included works produced c. 1867–86 by a group of artists who shared approaches, techniques, and discontent with academic teaching, originally including Claude Monet , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Camille Pissarro , Alfred…
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Full text Article impressionism, in painting

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
in painting, late-19th-century French school that was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of pure, broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity. It was loosely structured in that many painters were…
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Full text Article Impressionism

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
A term principally applied to the style cultivated by Claude Debussy during the final decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. The term was originally introduced in the visual arts to characterize the work of a group of French painters of the late 19th century (e.g., Monet, whose…
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Full text Article IMPRESSIONISM

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
The title of Claude Monet's 1872 painting, Impression, Sunrise , featuring the port of Le Havre, is frequently cited as one of the origins of the term Impressionism. Impressionism, perhaps the last representational art movement, arose in the 1860s in France, with Edouard Manet acknowledged as its…
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Full text Article Impressionism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Movement in painting that originated in France in the 1860s and had enormous influence in European and North American painting in the late 19th century. The Impressionists wanted to depict real life, to paint straight from nature, and to capture the changing effects of light. The term was first used…
| 837 words
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Full text Article POST-IMPRESSIONISM

From The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
Between November 1910 and January 1911, art historian, critic and painter Roger Fry shocked and infuriated the British artistic establishment with his curation of the first of two Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London. He coined the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ ‘in a moment…
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Full text Article Post-Impressionism

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Movement in Western painting that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of its limitations. The term was coined by Roger Fry for the works of Paul Cézanne , Georges Seurat , Vincent van Gogh , Paul Gauguin , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , and others. Most of these painters…
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Full text Article post-Impressionism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Broad term covering various developments in French painting that developed out of Impressionism in the period from about 1880 to about 1905. Some of these developments built on the achievements of Impressionism, but others were reactions against its concentration on surface appearances, seeking to…
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