Impressionism

Our impressionist puzzles feature artworks by the most important painters of the French Impressionist period.

Impressionism is an artistic movement that developed in France, in Paris, in the second half of the nineteenth century, specifically between 1860 and 1870, and lasted until the early years of the twentieth century.

It was inaugurated in the studio of the photographer Nadar with the famous painting Impression, Sunrise by Monet, from which it would take its name.

In fact, this artistic movement is characterized by a precise aesthetic experience in a historically defined moment. This tendency is identified within modern artistic culture, with painters who loved to paint “en plein air“, that is outdoors, in order to capture the immediate impression of their experience.

The characteristics underlying Impressionism are numerous and well defined. The rejection of the importance of the subject, the centrality of landscape painting, the supremacy of color over drawing, and the new, subjective identity of the artist. Indeed, the artist should not apply a filter to their emotions and hide them, but rather use them to create impressionist paintings.

Impressionist painting was largely influenced by the invention of the camera and by Chevreul’s color theories.
According to these principles, colors had to be placed next to each other rather than mixed on the canvas, thus ensuring the creation of scenes that were even more realistic and movements of the subjects more fluid and closer to reality, without excessive adjustments that would have made the work cumbersome.

The great revolution of Impressionism is above all its technique, although much of its popularity with the general public derives from its poetic vision.

The Impressionist technique was born from the choice to represent only sensory reality. It avoids any reference to the ideal construction of reality, focusing only on the optical phenomena of vision. To achieve this, it seeks to reproduce the optical sensation with the greatest possible fidelity.

From the point of view of its poetic vision, Impressionism seems indifferent to subjects. In reality, precisely because it can make anything it represents pleasant, Impressionism became the style of the Parisian “dolce vita” of those years.