In 1867, the painter Claude Monet (1840-1926), who had been rebuffed by the academic salons, exhibited under somewhat less conventional auspices a painting called Impression: Sun Rising. Before long "impressionism" had become a term of derision to describe the hazy, luminous paintings of Monet's paintings.

The impressionists strove to retain on canvas the freshness of their first impressions. They took painting out of the studio into the open air. Instead of mixing their pigments on a palette, they juxtaposed brushstrokes of pure color on the canvas, leaving it to the eye of the beholder to to the color mixing. An iridescent sheen bathes their pictures. Outlines shimmer and melt in a luminous haze.

The Impressionists abandoned the grandiose subjects of Romanticism. The hero of the impressionist painting is not man but light. The Impressionist preferred "unimportant" material: still life, dancing girls, nudes and everyday scenes of middle-class life, picnics, boating and café scenes; nature in all her aspects, Paris in all here moods. Ridiculed at first – "Whoever saw grass that's pink and yellow and blue?" – the Impressionists ended by imposing their vision upon the age.