Art was to depict idyllic nature, not industry. Critics also found fault with the subject to the academic art world an image of France’s largest port was simply inappropriate. The result is an evocative impression of a fleeting dawn moment just before the sun burns off the haze revealing a less romantic view of the port.īut Monet’s impression of a sunrise did not appeal to all: many thought his sweeps of liquid colour looked simply like an unfinished painting (Even Monet once said that he entitled this painting Impression, Sunrise, because it lacked the topographical detail and he thought ‘it would not pass as a view of Le Havre’). Two indistinct boats move across the harbour and the docks and smokestacks are only hinted at by Monet’s broad, freehand strokes.
Still cloaked in the dawn haze, the port wakes as an impasto orange orb rises in the sky reflecting orange in the grey-blue water. In London he had visited museums with Pissarro, admiring the works of Constable and Turner, whose famously atmospheric late work featured light, water and smoke blending in increasing abstract ways.Ĭlearly inspired, Monet filled this canvas with steam, fog and smoke, blending the mid- and background together. At the time, he had just recently returned to Paris from London, where he had fled to avoid military service in the Franco-Prussian war. Monet had painted the scene while in Le Havre in 1872. So in 1874 the group organised their own unofficial salon and it was at this first Impressionist exhibition that this painting caused such a stir. Monet became part of an avant-garde circle that included Manet, Pissarro, Degas and others but this group’s modern style had little success at the official Paris Salons. Later in the Paris studio of academic history painter Charles Gleyre, Monet met Renoir, Bazille and other future Impressionists. Monet had been introduced to plein-air painting in his native Normandy where he studied with the noted seascape painter Eugène Boudin. And Monet would become one of its greatest proponents. Luckily the painter, 32-year-old Claude Monet, was impervious to such criticism: his friend Renoir once recalled that Monet’s reaction to the review was to shrug and say, ‘Those poor blind people want to see everything clearly in the fog!’īut from this painting and its scornful review comes the name of the avant-garde movement that would revolutionise the art world: Impressionism. This was how this painting, Impression: Soliel Levant, was described in a scathing review mockingly entitled, ‘The Exhibition of the Impressionists’, published in the satirical journal Le Charivari on April 25, 1874. ‘Wallpaper in its original state is more perfect than this seascape.’ Claude Monet: Impression, Sunrise - 1872 Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet
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