The Accidental Impressionist Movement: Monet, the Mist, and the Myth of the Sunrise
- Art d'Histoire
- Feb 18
- 5 min read
In April 1874, a group of artists who had too often been rejected by the official Salon decided to organise their own exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines. They called themselves the "Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres," a neutral and somewhat corporate title designed to avoid controversy. However, history would not remember them by this name, thanks to a moment of casual improvisation by Claude Monet. When the time came to print the catalogue, Edmond Renoir, the brother of the painter Pierre-Auguste, found Monet’s titles monotonously repetitive. Faced with a view of Le Havre enveloped in mist, Edmond demanded a more specific title than the generic "Morning in a Village" or "Entrance of a Village" that Monet had provided for other works. Monet, indifferent to the descriptive precision valued by the Academy, simply shrugged and replied: "Put Impression." The term was made to make history.
The Birth of a Label
This casual instruction had unintended consequences that would shape the future of art. The painting was listed as Impression, Sunrise, and acritic, searching for a weapon to attack these rebels, seized upon the word. As recounted in the article regarding Impression, Sunrise, the satirical press weaponised the term, dubbing the group "Impressionists." The joke was meant to imply that their work was unfinished, a mere sketch rather than a completed art object. Monet later recalled to Maurice Guillemot that the term "Impressionism" and the subsequent jokes all stemmed from that single moment of cataloguing frustration, turning a throwaway comment into a banner of revolution.
The Mystery of the Canvas
For decades, art historians assumed that the painting which christened the movement was the famous canvas now residing in the Musée Marmottan in Paris. However, significant doubt clouds this certainty. As detailed in the investigation into Marine or Impression, Sunrise, the historian John Rewald raised compelling arguments suggesting the painting exhibited in 1874 might actually have been a different work, now held at the Getty Museum.
Rewald noted that the Marmottan painting does not clearly show the "masts of ships pointing into the distance" that Monet described, and the sun appears to be setting rather than rising. Furthermore, Monet rarely exhibited the same painting twice, yet a work titled Effect of Fog, Impression was shown in 1879, which many believe was the Marmottan canvas. If true, the painting that launched the most famous movement in modern art history might be the Sunrise (Marine) in Los Angeles, leaving the Paris version as a later re-exhibition. No source today allows us to definitively rule out either possibility, maintaining a fog of mystery over the movement’s origins.
The Studio Boat and the Open Air Myth
Central to the Impressionist legend was the idea that these artists had abandoned the studio entirely to work en plein air. Monet cultivated this image aggressively. When the journalist Émile Taboureux asked to visit his studio in 1880, Monet staged a dramatic refusal. As described in Monet without a studio, the artist flashed with anger and gestured towards the Seine and the hills of Vétheuil, declaring, "My studio! But I’ve never had a studio... Here, this is my studio."
To reinforce this, Monet used a "studio boat," a small floating cabin that allowed him to paint from the water level, a practice he borrowed from Charles-François Daubigny. Manet even immortalised this in his painting The Painter Monet in his Studio. However, later historians like Daniel Wildenstein have classified Monet’s declaration as a "classic mystification." In reality, the boat was too small for his large canvases, and the house in Vétheuil was too crowded with the Hoschedé family and their children to serve as a proper workspace. Monet did, in fact, finish many works indoors, but the "plein air" slogan was a necessary marketing tool to distinguish his brand of truth from the artificiality of the Salon.
The Bourgeois Compromise
Despite his rebellious stance, Monet was not immune to the economic realities of the art market. By 1880, facing financial desperation, he might have made a calculated decision to alter his style to appeal to the very institution he had mocked. In a candid letter to Théodore Duret, Monet confessed that he was working on bourgeois paintings for the Salon . He admitted that he was doing something "wiser" and less radical because it was in his interest to "break through the door" of the official exhibition to do business with dealers like Petit.
Monet acknowledged that his friends called him a "quitter" for this betrayal of their independent exhibitions, but he argued that the press had treated their shows as a joke. To survive, he had to cater to what was derogatorily known as "bourgeois taste"—a preference for polished, intelligible art that the wealthy middle class could understand. This effort resulted in the acceptance of his landscape Lavacourt, a view of the Seine.
The Verdict on Lavacourt
The reception of this "wiser" painting reveals the harsh politics of the Salon. As noted in the review of Lavacourt in La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the painting was accepted but hung poorly. The Marquis de Chennevière, a defender of academic institutions, admitted that while the painting was "lost among the friezes" and might not benefit from close inspection, its "luminous and clear atmosphere" made all the neighbouring landscapes appear dark by comparison.
Émile Zola offered a more poetic defence of his friend’s compromise. He lamented that Lavacourt was placed so high on the wall that "no one looks up," causing the painting to go unnoticed by the general public. However, Zola argued that this poor placement actually served to highlight Monet's genius. Surrounded by "bituminous canvases of dull mediocrity" that formed a "frame of darkness," Lavacourt shone with the brightness of a rising sun, creating an "exquisite note of light and open air" that the official Salon could suppress but not extinguish. Thus, even in his attempt to conform, Monet’s inherent radicalism burned through the gloom of academic tradition.
This blog is based on the anthologies of primary sources edited by Art d'Histoire Academy. The complete academic references are available in the following publication:
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