Description
Unlike classical painting, this work does not tell a story — it is simply a snapshot of reality captured the way a photographer might frame it, without any religious, mythological or genre content. In this sense, it can be considered anti-narrative, with light itself as the true protagonist.
This celebrated painting was created from a scene in the harbour of Le Havre. Monet depicts a mist that lends a hazy backdrop to the piece, set in the French port. The orange and yellow tones contrast vividly with the dark vessels, where little or no detail is immediately visible to the viewer. It is a bold, direct work showing smaller boats in the foreground, seemingly carried along by the movement of the water. Monet achieves this effect through separate brushstrokes that also render various “shimmering” colours across the sea.
From 15 April to 15 May 1874, Monet exhibited this work alongside Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Édouard Manet, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas and around thirty other artists. They organised the exhibition themselves, since they were regularly rejected by the Paris Salon. Most visitors were displeased, even indignant, at the style. Monet's Impression nonetheless attracted a great deal of attention, and some visitors claimed they were entirely unable to make out what was depicted.
A critic who attended the exhibition, M. Louis Leroy, wrote a now-famous article in Le Charivari in which he coined the term “Impressionist”, based on the title of this painting. Although Leroy had used the word mockingly, the group decided to adopt it, and painters such as Renoir and Degas were happy to be called Impressionists.
Despite its notoriety, the painting is in some ways atypical of Monet's own work from this period, and of Impressionism in general. It shows little of the Impressionist treatment of light and colour. The colours are quite restrained, and the paint is not applied in discrete strokes of contrasting colour but in very thin washes. In places, the canvas is even visible, and the only use of impasto is in the depiction of sunlight reflected on the water. The painting is more atmospheric than analytical and carries a spirit somewhat akin to the works of Turner. Even so, it illustrates particularly well one of the traits of Impressionist painting that was then considered so revolutionary.
The technique is very “sketch-like” and would have looked, at the time, more like a preliminary study than a finished work suitable for exhibition. Monet himself regarded the piece as unfinished, and it was for that reason that he adopted the title “Impression” to distinguish it from works such as his other view of Le Havre shown at the same exhibition, although that one, too, lacks the expected finish. In this work, Monet reduced detail to a minimum: the tiled shipyards in the background are merely suggested by a few brushstrokes, as are the boats in the foreground. The whole represents the artist's rapid attempt to capture a fleeting moment. The almost abstract, highly visible technique draws nearly more attention than the subject itself — a notion entirely foreign to viewers at the time.
An interesting curiosity about this painting is that its original title was simply “Impression”, but the art critic Louis Leroy, on seeing it at an exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874, mocked it in his review of the show, titling his piece “The Exhibition of the Impressionists”. In his review, Leroy referred to Monet's work as “Impression — good heavens! Could the critics not throw a bucket of green paint in its face?”, which gave rise to the painting's current title.
The painting depicts a seascape in the harbour of Le Havre, in northern France, characterised by a series of loose, rapid brushstrokes that create a hazy, fleeting atmosphere. Monet was more interested in capturing visual sensations and the effects of natural light than in representing reality as it appears. This was one of the defining features of the Impressionist movement, and Impression, Sunrise is one of its finest examples.
Today, Impression, Sunrise is regarded as the most celebrated and widely recognised Impressionist painting in the world, alongside Van Gogh's famous The Starry Night.
Impression, Sunrise ranks No. 8 on our list of famous paintings.