They constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours, following the example of painters such as Eugène Delacroix and J. M. W. Turner.

[2] Impressionism emerged in France at the same time that a number of other painters, including the Italian artists known as the Macchiaioli, and Winslow Homer in the United States, were also exploring plein-air painting.

Encompassing what its adherents argued was a different way of seeing, it is an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.

[5] In the middle of the 19th century—a time of rapid industrialization and unsettling social change in France, as Emperor Napoleon III rebuilt Paris and waged war—the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominated French art.

Using an eclectic mix of techniques and formulas established in Western painting since the Renaissance—such as linear perspective and figure types derived from Classical Greek art—these artists produced escapist visions of a reassuringly ordered world.

[9] By the 1850s, some artists, notably the Realist painter Gustave Courbet, had gained public attention and critical censure by depicting contemporary realities without the idealization demanded by the Académie.

[2] In 1863, the Salon jury rejected Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) primarily because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic.

[19] The organizers invited a number of other progressive artists to join them in their inaugural exhibition, including the older Eugène Boudin, whose example had first persuaded Monet to adopt plein air painting years before.

Disagreements arose from issues such as Guillaumin's membership in the group, championed by Pissarro and Cézanne against opposition from Monet and Degas, who thought him unworthy.

The individual artists achieved few financial rewards from the Impressionist exhibitions, but their art gradually won a degree of public acceptance and support.

The Impressionists learned much from the work of Johan Barthold Jongkind, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Eugène Boudin, who painted from nature in a direct and spontaneous style that prefigured Impressionism, and who befriended and advised the younger artists.

Although these methods had been used by previous artists—and are often conspicuous in the work of artists such as Frans Hals, Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner—the Impressionists were the first to use them all together, and with such consistency.

[29] Previously, painters made their own paints individually, by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil, which were then stored in animal bladders.

[33] The Impressionists reacted to modernity by exploring "a wide range of non-academic subjects in art" such as middle-class leisure activities and "urban themes, including train stations, cafés, brothels, the theater, and dance.

"[34] They found inspiration in the newly widened avenues of Paris, bounded by new tall buildings that offered opportunities to depict bustling crowds, popular entertainments, and nocturnal lighting in artificially closed-off spaces.

[35] A painting such as Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) strikes a modern note by emphasizing the isolation of individuals amid the outsized buildings and spaces of the urban environment.

Earlier painters of landscapes had conventionally avoided smokestacks and other signs of industrialization, regarding them as blights on nature's order and unworthy of art.

An example is Monet's Jardin à Sainte-Adresse, 1867, with its bold blocks of colour and composition on a strong diagonal slant showing the influence of Japanese prints.

[49] In the academic realm, women were believed to be incapable of handling complex subjects, which led teachers to restrict what they taught female students.

[50] Yet several women were able to find success during their lifetime, even though their careers were affected by personal circumstances – Bracquemond, for example, had a husband who was resentful of her work which caused her to give up painting.

Cassatt, in particular, was aware of her placement of subjects: she kept her predominantly female figures from objectification and cliche; when they are not reading, they converse, sew, drink tea, and when they are inactive, they seem lost in thought.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born painter who played a part in Impressionism although he did not join the group and preferred grayed colours.

In 1904, the artist and writer Wynford Dewhurst wrote the first important study of the French painters published in English, Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development, which did much to popularize Impressionism in Great Britain.

Fashionable painters such as Jean Béraud and Henri Gervex found critical and financial success by brightening their palettes while retaining the smooth finish expected of Salon art.

French Impressionist filmmakers include Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Louis Delluc, and Dmitry Kirsanoff.

Musical Impressionism beyond France includes the work of such composers as Ottorino Respighi (Italy), Ralph Vaughan Williams, Cyril Scott, and John Ireland (England), Manuel De Falla and Isaac Albeniz (Spain), and Charles Griffes (America).

Authors such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad have written works that are Impressionistic in the way that they describe, rather than interpret, the impressions, sensations and emotions that constitute a character's mental life.

[83] During the 1880s several artists began to develop different precepts for the use of colour, pattern, form, and line, derived from the Impressionist example: Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Post-Impressionist artists reacted against the Impressionists' concern with realistically reproducing the optical sensations of light and colour; they turned instead toward symbolic content and the expression of emotion.

Paul Cézanne, who participated in the first and third Impressionist exhibitions, developed a highly individual vision emphasising pictorial structure, and he is more often called a post-Impressionist.