![]() ![]() In 1874 the group held its first show, independent of the official Salon of the French Academy, which had consistently rejected most of their works. The Impressionists extended their new techniques to depict landscapes, trees, houses, and even urban street scenes and railroad stations. And finally, traditional formal compositions were abandoned in favour of a more casual and less contrived disposition of objects within the picture frame. Forms in their pictures lost their clear outlines and became dematerialized, shimmering and vibrating in a re-creation of actual outdoor conditions. More importantly, they learned to build up objects out of discrete flecks and dabs of pure harmonizing or contrasting colour, thus evoking the broken-hued brilliance and the variations of hue produced by sunlight and its reflections. In their efforts to reproduce immediate visual impressions as registered on the retina, they abandoned the use of grays and blacks in shadows as inaccurate and used complementary colours instead. They began by painting the play of light upon water and the reflected colours of its ripples, trying to reproduce the manifold and animated effects of sunlight and shadow and of direct and reflected light that they observed. These artists abandoned the traditional landscape palette of muted greens, browns, and grays and instead painted in a lighter, sunnier, more brilliant key. In the late 1860s Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and others began painting landscapes and river scenes in which they tried to dispassionately record the colours and forms of objects as they appeared in natural light at a given time. Monet, Claude: The Beach at Sainte-Adresse The Impressionists also adopted Boudin’s practice of painting entirely out-of-doors while looking at the actual scene, instead of finishing up a painting from sketches in the studio, as was the conventional practice. About the same time, Monet was influenced by the innovative painters Eugène Boudin and Johan Barthold Jongkind, who depicted fleeting effects of sea and sky by means of highly coloured and texturally varied methods of paint application. ![]() In Manet’s painting the subject became a vehicle for the artful composition of areas of flat colour, and perspectival depth was minimized so that the viewer would look at the surface patterns and relationships of the picture rather than into the illusory three-dimensional space it created. ![]() By the late 1860s, Manet’s art reflected a new aesthetic-which was to be a guiding force in Impressionist work-in which the importance of the traditional subject matter was downgraded and attention was shifted to the artist’s manipulation of colour, tone, and texture as ends in themselves. They also rejected the conventional imaginative or idealizing treatments of academic painting. These artists became dissatisfied early in their careers with academic teaching’s emphasis on depicting a historical or mythological subject matter with literary or anecdotal overtones. Jongkind, Johan Barthold: The Seine and Notre-Dame de Paris
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