As France celebrates, it doesn’t seem like 150 years since the first impressionist exhibition

Auguste Renoir: Bal du Moulin de la Galette, 1876.

"... By the standards to which European artists had cleaved for the previous four centuries, Impression, Sunrise isn’t a finished work of art at all but an oil sketch. 'An impression indeed!' the critic Louis Leroy sneered when it was unveiled along with works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and more in an 1874 group show. Another critic dismissed the works as 'paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly over a dirty canvas'. But it was Leroy’s review that bit, with his parting shot that the entire show was 'the exhibition of impressionists'. The name stuck and 150 years on, the first impressionist exhibition is being commemorated in France with the enthusiasm the British reserve for a royal wedding. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition 1874: Inventing Impressionism opens on 26 March, with other impressionist shows coming in Strasbourg, Tourcoing, Clermont-Ferrand, Chartres, Nantes, Bordeaux, with an impressionist festival planned in Monet’s Normandy. ..."


Camille Pissarro: The Boulevard Montmartre at Night, 1897

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