Patrick Downie
1910s Impressionist Landscape Paintings
Oil
19th Century Impressionist Landscape Drawings and Watercolors
Watercolor, Board, Pencil
People Also Browsed
Early 20th Century Impressionist Landscape Paintings
Oil, Canvas
Antique Late 19th Century Victorian Platters and Serveware
Ceramic
Mid-19th Century Victorian Portrait Paintings
Oil
1890s Naturalistic Animal Paintings
Oil, Canvas
Mid-19th Century Victorian Landscape Paintings
Canvas, Oil
Antique Late 19th Century English Aesthetic Movement Platters and Serveware
Earthenware
Early 20th Century Victorian Landscape Paintings
Oil
Mid-19th Century Victorian Animal Paintings
Oil
2010s European Ceramics
Earthenware
Late 19th Century Naturalistic Landscape Paintings
Oil, Canvas
Antique 1890s British Victorian Paintings
Paint
19th Century Victorian Animal Paintings
Oil
2010s European Ceramics
Earthenware
Antique 19th Century French Barbizon School Paintings
Canvas, Paint
2010s European Ceramics
Earthenware
Antique Late 18th Century English George III Wall Brackets
Brass
Recent Sales
Late 19th Century Impressionist Landscape Drawings and Watercolors
Watercolor, Panel
A Close Look at impressionist Art
Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.
The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.
Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.
Find a collection of authentic Impressionist art on 1stDibs.