Impressionism was the artistic movement that paved the way for modern art. The work of painters like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot represented a radical break from established conventions of French art during the nineteenth century.

Impressionism was the First Modern Art Movement Claude Monet, Blanche Hoschede-Monet, 19th century, via Sotheby’s Art historians often cite Impressionism as the first truly modern art movement. Leaders of the style deliberately rejected the traditions of the past, paving the way for the modernist art that followed.

Rejecting established styles, the Impressionists began experimenting in the early 1860s with a brighter palette of pure unblended colors, synthetic paints, sketchy brushwork, and subject matter drawn from their direct observations of nature and of everyday life in and around Paris.

Before then, art historians mostly concentrated on the style of the works and the way Impressionist innovations in form heralded or consolidated what seemed to them to be the most significant feature of modern art: the liberation of the artist from the constraints of convention, and the “evolution” of art toward flatness and abstraction.