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How the Impressionists Learnt to Paint
The early years of four artists who staged a groundbreaking exhibition
I recently discovered that it’s exactly 150 years since the French Impressionists broke with tradition and held their first independent exhibition in April 1874. It was a seminal event: never before had a collective of unknown artists dared to act outside the confines of the state-sponsored Salon. Its ripple effect would steer art into a new age and influence generations to come.
When I heard about the anniversary, I started to wonder how the Impressionists actually came about: where did artists like Monet, Renoir, Degas and Pissarro come from? What was their early trajectory into art and what circumstances eventually brought them together?
By digging into the formative years of these artists it’s possible to pin down the Impressionists within a wider context of art history, and in doing so learn much more about the meaning and purpose of their epoch-making paintings.
Youthful beginnings
The four key artists I’ve mentioned — Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro — were all born within 11 years of each other. (Pissarro was born first in 1830; Renoir last in 1841.)
All four artists enjoyed a life-long relationship with Paris. Both Monet and Degas were born in the French capital, whereas Renoir moved there at the age of three when his father, a tailor, came in search of work.
Only Pissarro had a delayed entrée into Paris: he was in fact born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas and was sent to Paris during his early adolescence. (St Thomas is now in the US Virgin Islands, but in 1830 it was the Danish West Indies.)
In Paris, the would-be artists enjoyed a wealth of contact with French art in the great museums of the city.
Renoir especially spent much of his youth in the halls of the Louvre where he admired the soft, musical brushstrokes of the French Rococo painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honore Fragonard and François…
