Landscapes, daily life, immediate sensation, uncensored truth of the eyes, brillant freshness of colours, contempory life, "joie de vivre", luminosity, colours harmony, sensuality ...This is my way of seeing the Impressionist movement
Their paintings are reflecting a particular frame of mind, they were obsessed with analysis of light and the process of seeing and completely dedicated their talent to record happiness, lightness, beauty, freshness, with few exceptions. For instance, Degas' L'Absinthe in which you can see a woman lost in her thoughts and a man smoking a pipe, seated side by side, both of the figures are melancholic. Their psychological distance from one another stressed by their physical proximity.
Anyway, they left us incredible gifts full of "Joie de vivre", even though their own lifes were often uneasy and uncomfortable. In spite of the conservative critics' sternness they had to bear, they kept on creating masterpieces.
Impressionist movement started in the nineteenth century and was absolutely new painting arts, although Impressionism's ancestors were the realists and naturalists, like Delacroix, Watteau, Velasquez, Goya ... Some of impressionist masters drawed their inspiration from Renaissance (Marcantonio Raimondi, Raphaël, this allow me to show the close link between Renaissance and Impressionism, as they are both movements I like best.
I enclose some Impressionists' photographs (Renoir, Monet) merely to point out as well, the impact of such a new scientific invention of the period. Photography could capture reality with fidelity and a regard for detail, but wasn't able to render one of the Impressionists' major interest; the colour.
