The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

In the 1860s, a radical new style of painting emerged in France that would later come to be called Impressionism. Impressionism rejected the highly formalized techniques and highbrow subject matter of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, whose annual juried show, the Salon de Paris, dictated the ins and outs of French Art. Instead of painting historical scenes and portraits with fine layers of translucent paint, Impressionists loaded their canvases with opaque layers of bright pigment to create immersive landscapes. 

This new style was made possible by the arrival of new technologies, such as synthetic pigments and premixed paint tubes. There was also growing political unrest in France at the time, which corresponded to a growing dissatisfaction with establishment institutions like the Académie. After being rejected by the Salon many times, the movement’s leading artists formed their own independent society, putting on their first exhibition in 1874. Though this first exhibition drew extensive criticism, the Impressionists continued to meet and put on exhibitions until 1886, by which point their techniques and ideal had become mainstream in French art.

By the 1880s, Impression had given way to a series of new schools of painting which were growing increasingly popular in Paris’s fine art scene.