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Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) is a painting by Claude Monet. Shown at the first impressionist exhibition in April 1874, the painting is attributed to giving rise to the name of the Impressionist movement. Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of La Havre, Monet’s hometown, and was the most famous of his series of six paintings depicting the harbor.

Background Monet visited his hometown of Le Havre in the Northwest of France in December of 1873, and proceeded to create a series of works depicting the port of Le Havre. The six painted canvases depict the port “during dawn, day, dusk, and dark and from varying viewpoints, some from the water itself and others from a hotel room looking down over the port.” (Brettell 126). 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.”.” (Smith 8) Among thirty participants, the exhibition was lead by Monet, Degas, Pissaro, Renior, and Sisley, showing over two hundred works that were seen by about 4,000 people, “including some rather unsympathetic critics.” (Tucker 148).

Impressionist Exhibit Titling the painting and the movement: Impression and Impressionism Monet claimed that he titled the painting Impression, Sunrise due to his hazy painting style in his depiction of the subject: “They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: 'Put Impression.' [1] Art Historian Paul Smith extrapolates, claiming that “in part at least, his title was meant to excuse his painting from accusations of being unfinished or of lacking descriptive detail.” (Smith 19) While the title seemed to be chosen in haste for the catalogue, the term “Impressionism” was not new; “it had been used to describe the effect of pictures of the Barbizon school, especially Daubigny, and Manet himself had used it of his own work” (Wilson 124). In critic Louis Leroy’s review of the 1874 exhibition, “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” for the newspaper Le Charivari, Leroy used “Impressionism” to describe the new style of work displayed, typified by Monet’s painting. Initially used to describe and deprecate a movement, the term “was immediately taken up by all parties” to describe the style (Wilson 124). While Leroy’s use is sometimes attributed as the origin on the term to describe the movement, “Impression had many precedents before Monet used it in the title of Impression, Sunrise in 1984. At first it referred to the initial effect which a natural scene made on the painter, and to the effect which a painting had on the viewer…. By the 1860s impression began to be used by transference to describe the painting which recorded such a natural effect.” (House 158) In turn, impression came to describe the movement as a whole as a result from the already existing use of the term, Monet’s consideration of his own work, Leroy’s review, and the fittingness of the term impression to capture the movement’s attitude toward subject matter.

Subject and Interpretation Impression, Sunrise depicts the port of Le Havre at sunrise, the two small rowboats in the foreground and the red sun being the focal elements. 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. Behind them are other misty shapes that “are not trees but smoke stacks of packboats and steamships, while on the right in the distance are other masts and chimneys silhouetted against the sky.” (Tucker 154). In order to show these features of industry, Monet eliminated existing houses on the left side of the jetty, leaving the background unobscured. Following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the regeneration of France was exemplified in the thriving port of Le Havre (Smith 12). Art historian Paul Tucker suggests that the contrast of elements like the steamboats and cranes in the background to the fishermen in the foreground represent these political implications: “Monet may have seen this painting of a highly commercial site as an answer to the postwar calls for patriotic action and an art that could lead. For while it is a poem of light and atmosphere, the painting can also be seen as an ode to the power and beauty of a revitalized France.” (Tucker 155). The representation of Le Havre, hometown of Monet and a center of industry and commerce, celebrates the “renewed strength and beauty of the country... Monet’s ultimate utopian statement.” (Tucker 157). Art demonstrating France’s revitalization, Monet’s depiction of Le Havre’s sunrise mirrors the renewal of France (Tucker 158).

Style The hazy scene of Impression, Sunrise strayed from traditional landscape painting and classic, idealized beauty. 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.” (Smith 12). Loose brush strokes meant to suggest the scene rather than mimetically represent it demonstrate the emergent Impressionist movement in the wake of an emergent industrialization in France. Seeking individuality, Smith claimed that “Impression, Sunrise was about Monet’s search for spontaneous expression, but was guided by definite and historically specific ideas about what spontaneous expression was.” (Smith 15) The group of studies made from Monet’s hotel room in Le Havre in 1873: each canvas with a base layer of gray, in different tones. The layered effect provides depth in spite of imprecise details, creating a rich and tangible environment that seems like Le Havre, if not an exact likeness. Gordon and Forge discuss boundaries and the use of color in Impression, Sunrise: “Is it that the foggy dawn and the water of the harbor are described by this means on the canvas, or that the grayed canvas is seens an oblong of luminous fog? Sky and water in Impression, Sunrise are hardly distinguishable. Boundaries that are fundamental out there are the finest nuances here. The paint becomes the place and an effect by permission of the place and the effect, its glooming, opalescent oneness, its foggy blankness, its featureless, expectant emptiness that resembles, for the painter, an empty, uninflected canvas. The accents of blue-gray and orange that finally precipitate the sunrise and the boats and the masts in this empty field are like last-minute revelations that had to wait, not only for the particular glimmer of orange to burn its way through the fog and find its reflective path onto the water and Monet’s eye but for the canvas itself, pregant with the foggy space outside, to be ready to receive it.” (Gordon and Forge)

Criticism Most critics did not think Impression, Sunrise was one of the most notable pieces; it was briefly discussed only five times in all the reviews of the exhibition (Tucker 153). However, the reviews of the exhibition and of Monet’s painting both provide insight into the development of the movement and Monet’s work and development as an artist. Of the exhibition, Philippe Burty for La République Française, wrote in “News of the Day” (April 16, 1874): “Today, Wednesday, at Nadar the photographer’s former shop on the boulevard des Capucines, opens the show whose organization has been our subject for the last few days… The walls of the rooms, covered in brownish red woolen fabric, are extremely well suited to paintings. The daylight enters the rooms from the sides, as it does in apartments.” (Stuckey) However, this idyllic perspective of the exhibition was not considered by all. Louis Leroy for Le Charivari, is often quoted in his review on Monet’s work in particular. His article “The Impressionist Exhibition” (April 25, 1874) is written as a dialogue from the imaginary perspective of an old-fashioned painter, shocked at the works of Monet and his associates: “‘Ah! This is it, this is it!: he cried in front of n.98. ‘This one is Papa Vincent’s favorite! What is this a painting of? Look in the catalogue.’ ‘Impression, Sunrise.’ ‘Impression-- I knew it. I was just saying to myself, if I’m impressed, there must be an impression in there… And what freedom, what ease in the brushwork! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more labored than this seascape!” (Stuckey)

Leroy’s review is a covert backhand at the progressiveness of Impression, Sunrise, and is often attributed with the using the term impressionism for the first time, but he was not the only contemporary reviewer to speak on the term.

Jules Castagnary for Le Siécle wrote in “The Exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines”, “If we must characterize them with one explanatory word, we would have to coin a new term: impressionists. They are impressionists in that they render not the landscape but the sensation evoked by the landscape. The very word has entered their language: not landscape, but impression, in the title given in the catalog for M. Monet’s Sunrise. From this point of view, they have left reality behind for a realm of pure idealism.” (Stuckey) The type of idealism of an impression instead of landscape, Théodore Duret writes, is what epitomises Monet’s work and the impressionist movement.. Considering Impression, Sunrise and Monet’s work following the 1874 exhibition, Curet wrote in 1878: “If the word Impressionist was… accepted to designate a group of painters, it is certainly the peculiar qualities of Claude Monet’s paintings which first suggested it. Monet is the Impressionist painter par excellence….No longer painting merely the immobile and permanent aspect of a landscape, but also the fleeting appearances which the accidents of atmosphere present to him, Monet transmits a singularly lively and striking sensation of the observed scene” (Smith 8)

Monet after Impression In an interview with Maurice Guillemot for La Revue Illustrée, Monet reflected on his handling of landscape like the port of Le Havre in consideration of the movement and the 1874 exhibition:: “A landscape is only an impression, instantaneous, hence the label they’ve given us-- all because of me, for that matter. I’d submitted something done out of my window at Le Havre, sunlight in the mist with a few masts in the foreground jutting up from the ships below. They wanted a title for the catalog; it couldn’t really pass as a view of Le Havre, so I answered: “Put down Impression.” Out of that they got impressionism, and the jokes proliferated....” (Stuckey) Following 1874 and the rise of the Impressionist movement, Monet recalled Impression, Sunrise by naming other works with similar titles. The subtitles recalled Impression, Sunrise in style and influence, though their subjects varied. Examples of similarly titles works are Effet de brouillard, impression in 1879, L’Impression in 1883, Marine (impression) in 1887, and Fumées dans le brouillard, impression in 1904. 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.” (House 139). Evoking the name of Impression, Sunrise, but also provided 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. (House)

While the movement and the painting initially garnered controversy, Monet’s Impression, Sunrise gave rise to recognition and a name for the Impressionist movement, arguably exemplifying more than any other work or artist the Impressionist movement as a whole in style, subject, and influence (Smith 8).