Famous Impressionist Paintings You Need to Know About

A quick glance at this monumental Georges Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte reveals a world that seems frozen in time. In addition, the figures appear as if chiseled, imposing in their statuesque forms. 

"I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes and place them on canvases organized by harmonies of colour," explained Seurat. 

As the Impressionist artist stated himself, he wanted to evoke timelessness associated with ancient friezes and bring some of the grandeur of ancient Egyptian and Greek sculptures to the modern moment. 

Celebrated as one of the foremost examples of pointillism, a technique that was part of the broader impressionist experiments with colour and form, the painting comprises dots of colour that Seurat meticulously applied to the canvas, depicting different social classes relaxing on La Grande Jatte island in the Seine River.   

Featured image: Impressionist artist Georges Seurat's work A Sunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte, painted between 1884–1886, Creative Commons

When asked what title should be given to the catalogue of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, Claude Monet simply replied, "put Impression." He used the same name for this oil painting depicting the sunrise on the sea, which is considered a harbinger of the whole movement. 

Claude Monet's painting Impression Sunrise depicts Le Havre harbour while the red sun rises in the distance, dissolving forms in flickers of light. After its first public presentation, the painting was heavily criticized for its lack of academic standards. "Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape," wrote Louis Leroy, an artist, writer, and critic for La Charivari newspaper.

Regardless of the initial rejection, Claude Monet's painting redefined artistic postulates of the time, leading the medium into a new era of the plein air style and marking one of the most decisive moments in art history. 

Featured image: One of the most celebrated Impressionist artists, Claude Monet, painting titled Impression Sunrise, 1872–1872, shown at the first exhibition of Impressionists in Paris, via Creative Commons

Although linked to Post-Impressionism, Paul Cézanne stands out for his highly unique approach to painting, where, instead of depicting immediate impressions, he based his style on patches of colour arranged on the canvas. 

The Large Bathers is one of his most ambitious works and one of his many explorations of the theme of nudes. Cited many times as an example of his ideal of composition and its reference to classic monumental works, the piece arranges the figures in a pyramidal frieze-like form amid trees, bringing to mind Poussin's compositional method. 

The painting is part of a series of three Impressionism paintings representing bathers on which the artist worked up until his death. 

Featured image: Paul Cézanne - The Large Bathers, 1898, Creative Commons

Although the majority of his oeuvre belongs to the Post-Impressionist canon, Vincent van Gogh based many of his works on fleeting impressions of nature and the natural world he encountered.  

"This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big," he wrote to his brother Theo, describing his inspiration for The Starry Night. 

The window he refers to was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he spent his last years. Although based on direct observation, the Impressionist painting also transfers some of the artist's mental commotion and emotions to the viewer, most notably visible in his swirling gesture. Symbolically, the painting is a reminiscence on life and death, with cypress trees often seen as a bridge between the two worlds. 

Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.

Featured image: Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Creative Commons

When it was first exhibited, Luncheon of the Boating Party was hailed as "one of the most famous French paintings of modern times." Created by one of the most versatile Impressionist painters, Pierre Auguste Renoir, it shows the artist's mastery in capturing the effects of diffused light throughout the picture plain. 

Being one of his greatest genre paintings, the Luncheon was created in a period when Renoir started switching from plein air to studio work. Depicting a group of people enjoying leisure time, a fundamentally modern topic, it shows many of Renoir's friends, including his future wife, the seamstress Aline Charigot, in the bottom left corner. 

Featured image: One of the most famous Impressionists, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, painted between 1880-81, Creative Commons

Although the subject of the painting is a reclining female nude, a theme present in art throughout history, when first presented to French audiences, Edouard Manet's Olympia caused a scandal. 

Regardless of its classical subject of a reclining woman, the Impressionist painting was quite different from those traditionally shown in the Parisian Salon. Instead of enshrining the nude in the moralist veil of mythological paintings, Manet decided to show the modern world as it is, which included prostitutes and other figures from social margins. 

By replacing Titian's Venus from Venus of Urbino with a prostitute, Manet broke the academic tradition of the idealized nude and also confronted the viewers with Olympia's direct gaze, replacing a passive figure with a woman aware of her agency. 

Another of the Post-Impressionist paintings that provoked criticism, Olympia was defended by Emile Zola and other Manet's contemporaries. 

About Manet's paintings Zola wrote: 

You know what effect Monsieur Manet's canvases produce at the Salon. They punch holes in the wall. Spread all around them are the wares of fashionable confectionaries — sugarcane trees and piecrust houses, gingerbread gents and whipped-cream ladies.  

Featured image: Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Creative Commons

Besides reworking traditional themes such as landscapes, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism also introduced new topics to art. Depictions of everyday scenes, modern entertainment, and leisure time amassed in the period, with some artists turning to the less explored topics within this modern sphere. 

One such painting, done in the realist style, is Gustave Caillebotte's Les raboteurs, which is the first representation of urban proletariat. Although the images of workers were present in art before ( in works by Millet and Courbet, who mostly depicted peasants), urban workers were rarely shown. With industrialization, urban structures developed, and new social classes emerged, but they were rarely among the painterly subjects. 

Caillebotte's scene does not have any moralist undertones but was nonetheless rejected by the Jury of the Salon of 1875 for its "vulgar subject."

Featured image: Gustave Caillebotte, Les raboteurs, 1875, Creative Commons

One of the rare women artists of the early modern era whose name is well known today is Mary Cassatt. Building on the Impressionist momentum and depictions of the everyday, Cassatt expanded its thematic repertoire with depictions of children in her Impressionism artworks. 

Stylistically, The Boating Party shows her interest in more decorative colours she developed while spending summers on the Mediterranean coast at Antibes, as well as the influence of Japanese prints in depicting flat surfaces, which were very popular in the late 19th century in Paris.  

Featured image: Mary Cassatt - The Boating Party, 1893-94, Creative Commons