Cookies

We use essential cookies to make our site work. We'd also like to set analytics cookies that help us make improvements by measuring how you use the site. These will be set only if you accept.

For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our cookies page.

Essential Cookies

Essential cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. For example, the selections you make here about which cookies to accept are stored in a cookie.

You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.

Analytics Cookies

We'd like to set Google Analytics cookies to help us improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify you.

Third Party Cookies

Third party cookies are ones planted by other websites while using this site. This may occur (for example) where a Twitter or Facebook feed is embedded with a page. Selecting to turn these off will hide such content.

Skip to main content

Claude Monet & the Birth of Impresionism

The Magpie, 1869, oil on canvas, Claude Monet, Musee d’Orsay, Paris The Magpie, 1869, oil on canvas, Claude Monet, Musee d’Orsay, Paris

It was with paintings such as The Magpie and La Grenouillere completed in 1869, that Impressionism truly came of age. But if it was not just a happy accident, how did this transformation in Western European painting really come about? In the Paris of the mid 19th century, the principal power brokers were the Academic establishments, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Ateliers and the Annual Saloon. Selection by the Salon Jury of works by a young aspiring painter, or sculptor, was the first step on the long road to official acceptance and future patronage. However, with the power wielded by Establishment painters such as Gerome, Cabanel, and Messonier, achieving such approbation was an uphill struggle. Whilst Delacroix’s Romanticism and Courbet’s Realism were the revolutionary forces, the landscape painters of the Barbizon School, Daubigny, Troyon and Rousseau were also exploring the boundaries of their genre and in Normandy, Eugene Boudin and Johann Barthold Jongkind were the early masters of the sea, sky and light. It was here in Le Havre, that Claude Oscar Monet met Boudin and Jongkind, so commencing on his tortuous and momentous journey to fame.

Please join me tonight as we discuss how the seeds of Impressionism were sown and how Monet became became the leader of a phenomenon, that would transform the art of picture making.