The End of Impressionism

"Techniques vary, art stays the same."

Jan 15, 2025

This is the final essay in a series celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition, which debuted in Paris in 1874. If you’d like to read other essays on the history of Impressionism, you can do so here.

*The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L’Estaque*, Paul Cézanne ca. 1885. One can see how Cézanne was already moving into his Post-Impressionist period. Via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In March of 1886, the Parisian art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and his son Charles left for New York City.

Twelve years had passed since the First Impressionist Exhibition, and while the artists were making progress, the French art market remained mostly hostile to these radicals. Durand-Ruel was a visionary—after all, it was he who embraced the Barbizon landscape artists before the public did, as he reminded readers in an 1885 editorial for L’Evénement. He defended the Impressionists for displaying the same originality: “I consider that the works of Degas, Puvis, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley are worthy of appearing in the greatest collections.”1

Nevertheless, most members of Paris’s thriving bourgeoisie were unmoved. Years later, Pierre-Auguste Renoir would tell his son Jean, “Durand-Ruel was a missionary. It is lucky for us that his religion was painting… In 1885 he almost went under, and the rest of us with him.”2

How close to going under?

For his loyal support of the Impressionists, Durand-Ruel had accrued a debt of one million gold francs. To make matters worse, he was falsely accused of selling a fake Daubigny in 1884. All the while, the Impressionists were losing their cohesion. Many members of the original group were moving out of Paris with their families; the city’s rapid gentrification over the previous twenty years had priced out numerous artists (a phenomenon with which many living in major cities today are all too familiar). As Baron Haussmann would snidely remark in 1890, “These days, it’s fashionable to admire old Paris, which people only know about from books.”3

The death of Édouard Manet further catalyzed the growing distance between members of the group, and though the painters tried to meet in Paris for monthly dinners, these visits became less frequent over the years.4 Such distance was likely palpable during the Eighth (and final) Impressionist Exhibition in 1886. Much to Claude Monet’s great annoyance, Camille Pissarro insisted that Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, the pioneers of pointillism, be included. Additionally among the new artists was Paul Gaugin. Monet refused to participate; Renoir also sat out, and the late Manet’s brother Eugène (the husband of Berthe Morisot) had no qualms sharing his disapproval with Pissarro.

Pissarro was incensed. Ever the champion of young artists, he wrote to his son Lucien, “I do not accept the snobbish judgements of ‘romantic impressionists’ to whose interest it is to combat new tendencies. I accept the challenge, that’s all.”5

*La Récolte des Foins, Éragny*, Camille Pissarro ca. 1887. This work was produced during Pissarro’s pointillist years, during which he was greatly influenced by Seurat and Signac. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Of the original Impressionists, only Pissarro, Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Edgar Degas participated. To some, it seemed that Impressionism might finally die out.

But Durand-Ruel refused to accept defeat. He had a particular genius for seeing opportunity where others saw obstacles, and he wondered if an American audience might be more open to the Impressionists. His networking with the American community in Paris proved fruitful. James Sutton, President of the American Art Association in New York, invited Durand-Ruel to showcase the Impressionists in the Association’s galleries on Madison Avenue. What’s more, the Association offered to cover shipping, insurance, and publicity costs against commission on sold works. Durand-Ruel managed to get the art to the United States duty-free by arguing that they were temporary imports for an “educational” exhibition.6

The artists, especially Monet, were befuddled by Durand-Ruel’s decision—that is, all except for the American in the group, Mary Cassatt, who herself believed that her countrymen would be interested in their art. Behind the scenes, she and John Singer Sargent had been working to introduce the Impressionists to American collectors. Likewise, Durand-Ruel already enjoyed the reputation of breaking the Barbizon artists. Critics and collectors largely came to the show in New York with an open mind, much to Durand-Ruel’s delight. “Don’t think that the Americans are savages,” he wrote to the Realist painter Henri Fantin-Latour. “On the contrary, they are less ignorant, less bound by routine than our French collectors.”7

*Maternal Caress*, Mary Cassatt ca. 1896. Cassatt’s later works were dominated by deeply intimate scenes of mothers with their children—a groundbreaking subject that would have been unfamiliar to her contemporaries. Via the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

That doesn’t mean reviews were uniformly positive; The Sun was as scathing as the Parisian press. However, many critics made an honest effort to understand this new wave of art, which gave Durand-Ruel the footing to eventually broker serious sales for his artists. As The Critic proclaimed, “New York has never seen a more interesting exhibition than this.”8

We Americans are far from perfect, but we do have a healthy tolerance for All-Things New, something that Durand-Ruel happily discovered. By 1888, he opened his own gallery in New York, and escalating sales gave the Impressionists greater financial security that had seemed so elusive only a few years before. To this day, countless Impressionist paintings reside in museums throughout the States as a consequence of Durand-Ruel’s efforts.

It is interesting that the Impressionists’ international fame arrived just when the movement’s solidarity disintegrated. After 1886, the artists continued moving in different directions stylistically and geographically. Newcomers were arriving onto the scene, from Seurat and Gaugin to Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse. The turn of the century marked the final gasps of the old world, and the graceful illusion of the Belle Époque would soon be shattered by the arrival of the First World War. Claude Monet, the last of the original Impressionists to pass away in 1926, greatly mourned the denouement of the style he had spearheaded:

Techniques vary, art stays the same: it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive. But the new movements, in their full tide of reaction against what they call “the inconsistency of the impressionist image,” deny all this in order to construct their doctrines and preach the solidity of unified volumes.9

All things fade, and Impressionism would indeed go the way of a golden afternoon. Yet if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of this series, it’s that the “new movements” Monet references likely wouldn’t have been born without the Impressionists. Their willingness to stand up to the Salon des Beaux-Arts and pursue innovative techniques and subject matter gave the next generation permission to do the same.

*The Water-Lily Pond*, Claude Monet ca. 1899. Monet perfected the art of the series in his later years. His *Water Lilies* series included over 250 oil paintings, whose brilliant colors would later inspire Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Writing this series for Crossroads has felt oddly prescient. We, too, are living through a revolution in the arts and media, a fact that will come as no surprise to the average Substack reader. (It seems that every day, we see an announcement from yet another cable news anchor or journalist who has jumped ship, swimming instead to Substack’s beckoning shores.) Some will mourn the decline of legacy media; I will happily wave goodbye to the likes of MSNBC and Fox, to Hollywood’s endless stream of remakes and reboots. Like the stubborn Salon jury, they only have themselves to blame.

We seem to be entering a new Wild West, or as

Ted Gioia

succinctly explained in The Honest Broker, media empires will find themselves replaced not by corporate competitors, but “by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.” The distribution of art and media is desperate for a transformation, one that writers will hopefully be able to take advantage of thanks to new platforms such as this one. Personally, I’m looking to the future with mingled excitement and trepidation.

If we only live long enough, nostalgia becomes a right of passage for us all. But when my time to look back arrives, I hope to embody the mindset of Pissarro rather than Monet, and refrain from the urge to “combat new tendencies.” The techniques of distribution may vary, but the zeal, the innovation, the art will remain.