IV.

Technique

It was the novelty of their technique more than their subject matter that set the impressionists apart from their contemporaries. They rejected somber tones and a painstaking degree of finish that removed all traces of the artist’s hand. These were qualities demanded by the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts), the institution that set the standards for French painting and organized the Salon. Instead of creating smoothly blended colors, the impressionists placed separate touches of vibrantly contrasting colors directly onto the canvas, sometimes without prior mixing on the palette, and allowed their brushstrokes to retain the liveliness and seeming spontaneity of a sketch. As a result their work appeared unfinished to many viewers, including the critic Leroy. Manet had encouraged this tendency in his paintings of the 1860s, in which he did away with the middle tones that would have eased the transition from lightest light to darkest dark. Instead, Manet set lights directly next to darks to create strikingly stark contrasts.

In seeking to capture the luminous effects of sunlight, the impressionists used light colors and applied them onto a light or white ground (the canvas's initial coat) rather than the darker ground that was then conventional. The impressionists worked quickly to preserve a feeling of spontaneity and directness. They often painted one color on top of another that was still wet, a practice that tends to blur contours and soften forms.

Scientific advances helped the impressionists. The new availability of oil paint in metal tubes made painting out of doors much easier, and new paints based on artificial pigments provided brighter colors, particularly blues, yellows, and greens. The impressionists also put into practice new scientific theories about color: To enhance the intensity of colors in their paintings, they avoided black or earth colors for depicting shadows and substituted complementary colors. So, for instance, the shadowed underside of a red apple would be dappled with shades of green.

Although each impressionist had his or her individual way of applying paint, they all tended to prefer impasto (thick, textural dabs of paint) to more traditional glazes (thin, transparent layers of paint). The impressionists were by no means the first artists in history to use impasto. Their predecessors include 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters Frans Hals and Peter Paul Rubens, and early 19th-century landscape painters John Constable in England and Théodore Rousseau in France.