Impressionism

Bryleigh Pierce
Dec 29, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Jan 12

Much like many movements that came before it, Impressionism was born out of frustration with staunch traditionalism and a desire to break with the institution’s definitions of art. Rejecting the polished finish and historical or mythological subjects favoured by the official Paris Salon, Impressionists sought instead to connect with a world that was rapidly changing around them, and so set out to capture the fleeting sensations of modernity, not just in terms of how it looked, but what it felt like to be a part of.

Mary Cassatt, Lady at the Tea Table (1883-85). Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 61 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, U.S.A.

Open compositions emphasised the transient effects of light on the subject, whether that be a village, a park or the interior of a sitting room, and the loose, visible brushstrokes that led critics to dismissing these works as unfinished sketches, gave them a sense of movement that reflected the ephemeral nature of the moments they were trying to capture and the spontaneity with which they did it.

Having gained access to academic training in the mid-nineteenth century, women again found themselves excluded from intellectual conversation and exchange of artistic ideas when the site of these discussions moved from the academies to cafés, bars, brothels and the streets themselves, giving rise to the flâneur, a hallmark of bourgeois masculinity.

Meanwhile, the women for whom social convention prohibited entry into these spaces, required a personal link to the men in the group which thus tied their creative output to whichever man formed this link. Furthermore, being unable to travel the city unchaperoned confined them to the home and their art to domestic interiors and scenes of motherhood, therefore visualising the ideological dichotomy between public and private spheres occupied by man and woman respectively.

Eva Gonzalès, The Milliner (c.1877). Pastel on canvas, 37 x 45 cm. Art Institute of Chicago, U.S.A.

Nevertheless, women painted the interior scenes and ‘feminine activities’ they encountered in their lives – domestic interiors, walks through parks, motherhood and families. They captured the private worlds of Paris’s upper-class women, lamenting their lack of independence while celebrating their small freedoms, and their frequent emphasis on women’s intellect and autonomy imbues their subjects with human emotion, instead of merely displaying them as spectacles. When viewed individually and as a whole, the work of women associated with the movement offers a depiction of the nineteenth century’s New Woman from a distinctly feminine perspective.

Impressionist women