Claude Monet is famous for giving Impressionism its name and its method. A harbor view he painted in 1872 lent the movement its label, and the series that followed, haystacks, a cathedral, a pond of water lilies, made changing light the subject of a painting.
In April 1874, Monet and a group of independent painters opened their own exhibition in Paris, because the official Salon kept turning them away. One canvas drew the critics' fire: a hazy harbor at dawn, painted from a hotel window in Le Havre.
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That label survived every other insult in art history, and the critic who used it did not invent it. On 25 April 1874, Louis Leroy published a review in Le Charivari, written as a dialogue between two skeptical visitors. Facing the harbor, one of them says, "Impression, I was certain of it," and reasons that "since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it."
The whole joke rested on one word on the wall of the exhibition: the title. Monet had written that title himself, and he explained why years later.
Leroy went on to say that wallpaper in its embryonic state was more finished than that seascape. The insult is the part everyone remembers. I think the title says more about Monet, because it belongs to a painter who was not trying to found anything.
Why did Monet call it Impression?
Because the picture could not honestly pass for a view of Le Havre. Monet gave that account to the writer Maurice Guillemot in an interview for La Revue illustrée. When the catalogue needed an entry, he told the organizers to put down "Impression."
Leroy, looking for a joke, took the word and turned it into the name of a group. The painters he was mocking adopted it themselves later on. By Monet's own telling, the most famous name in modern painting began as a stopgap label for a harbor he could not quite call a view. The harbor itself was far less vague than its title.
What You'll Discover
What morning it really shows.
Why one haystack became fifteen.
What the surgeon did to his colors.
What he gave France after the war.