Impressionism took its name from a painting, Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, shown in Paris in April 1874. A critic named Louis Leroy mocked the title in the satirical paper Le Charivari and called the whole group "Impressionists," as an insult. The painters kept the word.
Monet had not meant the title to start anything. Asked for one for the exhibition catalogue, he called the canvas Impression, because a harbor this hazy could not plausibly pass for a view of Le Havre. The picture is small, about 50 by 65 centimeters without its frame, and it belongs to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris.
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That word began as a way out of an awkward moment, not as a program. Monet needed a label, and the honest one, a view of Le Havre, would have been a stretch. Leroy's review came out on 25 April 1874, ten days after the show opened, and it was built entirely on that one word.
A joke in a satirical newspaper might have faded within the week. This one did not. A few days later another critic, Jules Castagnary, used the same word in a positive sense, and the painters ended up with a name handed to them from both sides, by a man who mocked them and by one who defended them.
I think Leroy's joke worked because the picture really did look unfinished at a glance. What is harder to say is how much of that look was chosen.
What did Monet want to call his painting?
A view of Le Havre, the obvious label for a harbor painted from a hotel window. Around November 1872, Claude Monet was staying at the Hôtel Amirauté in the port, and he painted the scene from his room. The Musée Marmottan says the picture took just a few hours, with the rowboats and the orange sun added at the very end.
Everything that would have made it a view had been left soft. The masts and smokestacks of a working port are only dim shapes in the mist, and the boats in the foreground are a few dark strokes on the water.
The catalogue for the 1874 show, held in the former studio of the photographer Nadar, needed a title, and Monet chose a word that promised nothing about the place. It went into print as Impression, Sunrise.
It was a small decision, and it might have stayed one if a journalist had not walked through those rooms and gone home with a joke.
What You'll Discover
What the critic actually wrote.
What disappears in black and white.
Who worked out the hour.
Where it hid for five years.