[1] Monet visited his hometown of Le Havre in the Northwest of France in 1872 and proceeded to create a series of works depicting the port.

[2] Impression, Sunrise became the most famous in the series after being debuted in April 1874 in Paris at an exhibition by the group "Painters, Sculptors, Engravers etc.

Inc."[3] Among thirty participants, the exhibition was led by Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley, and showed over two hundred works that were seen by about 4,000 people, including some rather unsympathetic critics.

In the middle ground, more fishing boats are included, while in the background on the left side of the painting are clipper ships with tall masts.

"[4] In order to show these features of industry, Monet eliminated existing houses on the left side of the jetty, leaving the background unobscured.

Paul Smith suggested that with this style, Monet meant to express "other beliefs about artistic quality which might be tied to the ideologies being consolidated by the emergent bourgeoisie from which he came.

"[10] Loose brush strokes meant to suggest the scene rather than to mimetically represent it demonstrate the emergent Impressionist movement.

Gordon and Forge discuss boundaries and the use of color in Impression, Sunrise, claiming that sky and water in Impression, Sunrise are hardly distinguishable, boundaries between objects are not obvious, and the paint "becomes the place" and effect, the colors of the paint melding together in "its glooming, opalescent oneness, its foggy blankness, its featureless, expectant emptiness that resembles, for the painter, an empty, uninflected canvas."

[12] Margaret Livingstone, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard University, said "If you make a black and white copy of Impression: Sunrise, the Sun disappears [almost] entirely.

"[12] Livingstone said that this caused the painting to have a very realistic quality, as the older part of the visual cortex in the brain — shared with the majority of other mammals — registers only luminance and not colour, so that the Sun in the painting would be invisible to it, while it is just the newer part of the visual cortex — only found in humans and other primates — which perceives colour.

His article "The Impressionist Exhibition" is written as a dialogue from the imaginary perspective of an old-fashioned painter, shocked at the works of Monet and his associates: "Ah, there he is, there he is!"

[14] Théodore Duret wrote that rendering idealized impressions instead of landscapes is what epitomises Monet's work and the impressionist movement.

Out of that they got impressionism, and the jokes proliferated...."[14] Following 1874 and the rise of the Impressionist movement, Monet recalled Impression, Sunrise by naming other works with similar titles.

These works then seemed as a continuation of his Le Havre scene, "one of the sequence of canvases in which he was seeking to capture the most fleeting natural effects, as a display of his painterly virtuosity.

"[17] Evoking the name of Impression, Sunrise, but also providing stylistic connections, the later paintings are similarly "quite summary and economical in handling, and depict particularly hazy or misty effects" that is characteristic of Monet's impressionism in particular.