Marking the 150th Anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition

Over the following three months, two masterpieces will be on show in the Claude Monet Hall (Hall 403): Camille Pissarro’s Town Park in Pontoise (1874) and Claude Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines in Paris (1873).

On 15 April 2024, it was exactly 150 years since the opening of the exhibition of the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, which has gone down in history as the first Impressionist exhibition. It took place on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, in the studio of the photographer Nadar, who was close to the circle of those who would become the Impressionists.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of that event. It is connected not only with the coining of the term “Impressionism”, and, consequently, the name not only of an artistic grouping, but also of a new method of painting, a fresh way of seeing the world.

More than 150 works were on show at the 1874 exhibition. Among those, only a few represented truly Impressionist painting. Two-thirds of the participants in that exhibition are completely forgotten today, but presenting their pictures alongside them were Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and also Paul Cézanne.

“Two paintings from that celebrated exhibition have found their way to Russia. It is remarkable that Claude Monet’s picture greatly resembles those that Camille Pissarro painted later, while Pissarro’s canvas is almost a typical Monet. This was indeed just the beginning,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, commented.

Town Park in Pontoise from the State Hermitage and Boulevard des Capucines from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow demonstrate two different creative approaches. Pissarro’s work, produced in 1874, shows a little corner of nature in a small town. What is to a large extent a genre painting depicts the sedate leisure activities of provincials. Although it is wholly filled with light and air, the artist created the work in the studio, carefully devising its composition, something particularly evident from the positioning of the people within the space. The picture was painted in a free Impressionistic manner, but here Pissarro did not follow one of the main principles of Impressionism – working en plein air. The composition goes back to the tradition of Rococo art, when one of the painters’ favourite motifs was the depiction of aristocrats at rest in the bosom of nature.

Claude Monet painted Boulevard des Capucines from the window of the photographer Nadar’s studio in 1873. The picture became one of the programmatic works exhibited in that same place a year later. Monet “snatched” a fragment of the street, with no great concern for the harmoniousness of the composition: the edge of the canvas has partially cut off the men on the balcony to the right. In this work, the artist was interested not in an individual person and even not the people generally – he was striving to record an instant of fast-flowing time. The large brushstrokes, unusual angle of view, the diagonal dividing the picture into two parts, one in shade, the other flooded with light – all those things convey a sense of the rapid movement characteristic of the capital. At the first Impressionist exhibition, the work was hung next to the window from which the artist had painted the view. So, the public could look and compare the sight outside with its painted image.

The exhibition-event in the General Staff building does not aspire to recreate the visual look of the first Impressionist exhibition but is rather an invitation to reflect on the context in which that event took place and in which the artists were working.

The exhibition curator is the researcher Olga Dmitriyevna Leontyeva, Keeper of French painting of the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries, Chief Curator of the Department of Western European Fine Art.

A publication has been prepared for the exhibition with an essay by Olga Leontyeva “Marking the 150th Anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition”.

The exhibition can be visited until 21 July 2024 by holders of entry tickets to the State Hermitage’s General Staff building.

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The first Impressionist exhibition was conceived as a commercial venture and not an artistic protest. For that very reason, the organizers, who shared similar aesthetic preferences, also invited artists who belonged to a wholly traditional school. That allowed them to share out the expense of setting up the exhibition between a larger number of participants, as well as attracting the public with some better-known names.

By the time the exhibition opened, the future Impressionists were already successful artists with their own circle of buyers. On occasion their works even passed selection for the official Salon. It was, however, difficult to view the paintings there: between 3,000 and 6,000 works would be arranged in several tiers tight up against one another.

Furthermore, the group’s art differed strongly from what Salon-goers expected to see – neither biblical nor mythological subjects, none of the battle scenes particularly popular at the time. After the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of the Commune, patriotic art ruled in the Salon, reflecting the tastes and mood of society. The Impressionists’ output, though, was completely apolitical.

The artists called themselves the Société anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, not wanting to give critics cause to speak of the appearance of a new school of painting. All their precautions proved to be in vain, however. Soon after the opening of the exhibition, where innovative works were on show along with pictures more familiar to the public eye, the word “Impressionist” became attached to the tendency. The artists were indebted to the art critic Louis Leroy for the name. He formed it from the title of Claude Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant that was on show at the exhibition. Leroy repeated it several times in his satirical article and even put it in the headline.

The hanging arrangement in the exhibition was far closer to modern-day conceptions about display than in the Salon – the paintings were placed loosely, in one, or less often two rows on two floors of Nadar’s studio. An expensive fabric between brown and claret red in colour was used to line the walls in keeping with the aesthetic of the day. The pictures were not affected by close proximity to more striking or more restrained works. Many people noted the positive impact of such an organization of the space.

Not all the critics condemned the Impressionists painting and poked fun at them. There were also some who hailed their initiative and perceptively saw that the future belonged to these rebels. From a commercial viewpoint, however, the exhibition was a failure. The takings from entry tickets and the paintings that sold were barely enough to cover the organizational expense and, given the size of Paris with its active artistic life, not all that many people visited the exhibition during its month-long run. Nevertheless, it was at the exhibition that the concept first appeared of the group as a whole tendency that would in time conquer the world.