Picture "Fog, Voisins" (1874), framed

The style of Impressionism, which emerged in French painting around 1870, owes its name to Claude Monet's landscape 'Impression, Soleil Levant'. After initial rejection, it began a veritable triumphal procession.

Painters such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir and others created motifs from everyday life, urban and landscape scenes in bright, natural light.

Impressionism can be seen as a reaction to academic painting. Rather than emphasizing content with a structured composition, it focused on the subject as it appears in the moment, often in a seemingly random snapshot. The reality was seen in all its variety of colours in natural lighting. Outdoor painting replaced studio painting.

Through the brightening of the palette and the dissolution of firm contours, a new approach to colour emerged. In many cases, the colours were no longer mixed on the palette but placed side by side on the canvas, so that the final impression emerged in the eye of the viewer with a certain distance. In "Pointillism", (with painters such as Georges Seurat or Paul Signac), this principle was taken to the extreme.

Outside France, Impressionism was taken up by painters such as Max Slevogt, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth in Germany, and by James A. M. Whistler in the United States.

However, Impressionism was only expressed to a limited extent in the art of sculpture. In the works of Auguste Rodin, who is considered one of the main representatives, a dissolution of surfaces is evident, in which the play of light and shadow is included in the artistic expression. Degas and Renoir created sculptures as well.