The Impressionist Revolution

"They call us impressionists as an insult," Monet told the American painter Mary Cassatt at the exhibition's opening. "Let them. We paint impressions—the truth of a moment, not the lies of the academy." His "Impression, Sunrise" gave the movement its name, though critic Louis Leroy had intended only mockery when he wrote, "Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than this seascape!"

But something in these broken brushstrokes and vivid colors spoke to the era's spirit. Traditional academic painting, with its mythological subjects and varnished surfaces, felt as outdated as monarchy itself. The Impressionists painted modern life: train stations, café scenes, middle-class leisure. They captured not eternal truths but fleeting moments—fitting for an age that seemed to accelerate daily.

Berthe Morisot faced particular challenges as a female Impressionist. Excluded from the informal male gatherings at the Café Guerbois where artistic theories were debated, forbidden from painting nude models or wandering alone through the city, she turned constraints into strengths. Her domestic scenes—a mother bathing a child, a woman at her toilette—revealed intimate worlds male artists couldn't access. "They say I paint only women and children," she wrote to her sister Edma. "As if the inner life of half of humanity were not worth depicting!"

The movement attracted remarkable women. Mary Cassatt, daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh family, defied her father's declaration that he would rather see her dead than living as a "bohemian" artist in Paris. Marie Bracquemond, trapped in a marriage to a jealous academic painter who resented her talent, painted luminous Impressionist works between domestic duties. Eva Gonzalès and Marie Bashkirtseff brought their own interpretations to the new style before their tragically early deaths.