The 13 Most Famous Impressionist Painters, and One Painting to Know Each By

On April 15, 1874, a group of painters the Salon kept turning away hung their own show in the photographer Nadar's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines. Ten days later a critic named Louis Leroy mocked one of Monet's harbor views in the satirical paper Le Charivari, and the insult stuck. That is how the most famous Impressionist painters got their name: from a joke they decided to keep.

The group exhibited together eight times, the last in 1886. Plenty of artists passed through those shows, but thirteen names carry the movement today, and each has one canvas that tells you almost everything about the painter. Below are those thirteen, with the painting I'd send you to see first. If you already know the pictures and want them closer, the Impressionist paintings people most often want on their walls are gathered in one place.

What makes a painting Impressionist

Speed, mostly. These painters worked fast, in front of the subject and often outdoors, with broken, flickering strokes meant to catch light before it changed. They painted what they saw around them: train stations, boating cafés, dance classes, city streets in the rain.

The other half of the definition is social. Impressionism was a group that organized its own exhibitions outside the official system, and who showed in those eight exhibitions shapes who we still call an Impressionist.

Thirteen painters, one picture each

1. Claude Monet (1840–1926): Impression, Sunrise

Start here, because the whole movement does. Around November 1872 Monet stayed at the Hôtel de l'Amirauté in Le Havre and painted the outer harbor from his window in the early morning. The canvas is small, 50 by 65 cm. When he had to give it a title for the 1874 catalogue, he called it an "Impression" because it could hardly pass as a proper view of the town. Leroy's review on April 25 turned that word into a label for the whole group.

The harbor at sunrise left private hands in 1940, when Eugène and Victorine Donop de Monchy gave it to the museum in Paris that holds it, and the Marmottan's catalogue entry for the painting lays out the whole story. Monet later bought a house at Giverny in 1883, dug a water garden there from 1893 and spent his last two decades painting it, around 250 canvases. If you only know the water lilies, this little sunrise is where to see what came before. The rest of Monet's work, from Argenteuil to Giverny, follows from it.

2. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919): Luncheon of the Boating Party

Renoir started out painting porcelain in Limoges, and you can still feel that decorator's pleasure in his surfaces. His best-loved picture is a crowded lunch on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise, a restaurant at Chatou. It's big (130.2 by 175.6 cm) and full of people he knew. The young woman cooing at her terrier is Aline Charigot, who would become his wife. The man sitting backward on his chair is Gustave Caillebotte, number nine on this list.

Duncan Phillips bought Renoir's lunch on the river in 1923 and wrote that his gallery was "to be the possessor of one of the greatest paintings in the world." You can see it at the Phillips Collection in Washington. It was painted in 1880–1881, just before a trip to Italy in 1881 made his style harder-edged and more classical, so it's the last great statement of his Impressionist years. The Renoir canvases that followed look noticeably different.

3. Edgar Degas (1834–1917): The Dance Class

Degas showed with the Impressionists from the very first exhibition, but his modern life was mostly indoors: dancers, entertainers, women at their toilette. The Dance Class of 1874, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is the one to learn him by. It's a rehearsal seen from the side of the room, the kind of unguarded moment the Salon painters never bothered with.

He later turned more and more to pastel, and as his eyesight failed he had to work in the studio close to the model. The dancers Degas kept coming back to fill most of his late work.

4. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903): The Crystal Palace

Pissarro was born on St Thomas in the Caribbean, was the oldest of the group, and was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions, 1874–1886. The largest group of his work anywhere is in Oxford. Painters younger than him kept turning up at his side: Gauguin worked with him in 1879 and 1881.

My pick is a small canvas from exile. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, Pissarro took his family to Lower Norwood outside London in 1870–1871. Nearby in Sydenham stood the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, built for Hyde Park in 1851 and moved there afterward. In his 1871 view of the palace, the famous building gets pushed to the left edge so the families and carriages on the road can share the picture. That choice, the ordinary street given equal weight with the monument, is Pissarro in one image.

5. Berthe Morisot (1841–1895): Woman at Her Toilette

Born in Bourges on January 14, 1841, Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight shows. She missed only 1879, having given birth to her daughter Julie in December 1878, and she was the driving force behind the last exhibition in 1886. She married Édouard Manet's brother Eugène in 1874.

Woman at Her Toilette (1875–1880), at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows a woman taking down her hair after a ball, still in her earrings. The mirror is painted so loosely that her reflection disappears, and Morisot signed her name along its bottom edge. It hung in the fifth exhibition in 1880, where her work was praised. Her brushwork here is feathery and fast, about as close as Impressionism gets to handwriting.

6. Mary Cassatt (1844–1926): The Child's Bath

Cassatt was born in what is now Pittsburgh, entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at 16, settled in Paris in 1874 and joined the Impressionists in 1877. She was the only American to exhibit with them, and her first showings came in 1879 and 1880.

The Child's Bath, from 1893, is later than her Impressionist shows, but it's the painting that sums her up. A woman holds a small child on her lap and washes the child's foot, and we look down on them from above so the carpet seems to stand upright. The flat patterns come from Japanese prints, which she studied closely in the 1890s. The Art Institute of Chicago bought it in 1910, the first Cassatt to enter the museum. Her mothers and children remain her best-known subject.

7. Édouard Manet (1832–1883): A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Manet is on every list of Impressionists and never once exhibited with them. He kept sending work to the Salon all his life. But his modern subjects and loose handling made him the group's elder statesman, and in the 1870s he painted landscapes and street scenes under Monet's and Renoir's influence.

His last major painting, shown at the 1882 Salon a year before he died, puts a barmaid named Suzon in front of a huge gilt mirror. Look at the reflection: Manet shifted it to the right, so the scene behind her doesn't quite line up with the woman in front. People have argued about that mirror ever since. The barmaid now stands in London, at the Courtauld Gallery. Manet's earlier Paris pictures make an interesting contrast.

8. Alfred Sisley (1839–1899): The Seine at Port-Marly, Piles of Sand

Sisley was born in Paris to British parents, trained in Gleyre's studio, and painted landscapes almost exclusively. Of the whole group he's the one most often overlooked, which is a shame. In 1875–1878 he lived at Marly-le-Roi, and in 1875 he painted men dredging sand from the Seine so barges could pass. Everyone else painted the river as a Sunday playground. Sisley showed it on a workday. The canvas is in Chicago.

9. Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894): Paris Street; Rainy Day

Caillebotte's paintings of Paris rarely leave the few streets around his home, and this is the one everyone knows. At 212.2 by 276.2 cm, his big rainy intersection was his largest and most ambitious work, and it hung in the third Impressionist exhibition in April 1877. There are no raindrops. You know it's raining from the new retractable umbrellas and the shine on the cobblestones. The couple in front walks almost into you, cropped the way a photograph would crop them.

His technique is closer to Realism than to Monet's quick strokes, which is why he was long treated as a minor figure. The painting in Chicago has been a visitor favorite since the museum acquired it in 1964, well before most people knew his name.

10. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906): Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)

Cézanne learned a great deal from the Impressionists and then went his own way. He wanted, in his own phrase, to "make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums." By the 1880s his brushwork had turned systematic and ordered, and the young Paris painters who found his work in the 1890s, Picasso among them, took it somewhere else entirely.

The large Bathers in London's National Gallery, about 1894–1905, shows where he ended up: a frieze of nude figures, weighty and deliberate, a long way from a sunrise over Le Havre. He folded the top of the canvas over the stretcher to cut down the sky, a change nobody noticed until it was re-stretched after his death.

11. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903): Ia Orana Maria (Hail Mary)

Gauguin became a stockbroker in 1871, painted on the side, and learned from Pissarro, working with him in 1879 and 1881. He showed in the later Impressionist exhibitions, 1880–1886, and quit the stock exchange in 1883. In 1891 he left Paris for Tahiti, where he made most of his famous paintings. Ia Orana Maria, whose Tahitian title means Hail Mary, is dated 1891 and now hangs at the Metropolitan Museum. It's the one to know. Nothing about it looks Impressionist anymore, which is exactly the point of including him.

12. Georges Seurat (1859–1891): A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884

Seurat showed his Sunday on the island in the Seine at the eighth and last Impressionist exhibition, May 15 to June 15, 1886, and broke with the movement in the same stroke. The canvas is enormous, 207.5 by 308.1 cm, and up close the figures dissolve into dots of complementary color laid side by side. He worked on it in 1884–1886 and added the painted border in 1888–1889. Where Monet chased a passing moment, Seurat wanted permanence, a modern crowd arranged like a classical frieze. Americans of a certain age know it from the scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, filmed in front of it at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it has hung since 1924.

13. Childe Hassam: The Little Pond, Appledore

The French founded Impressionism, but Americans carried it home. Hassam studied in Europe, then applied the bright palette and broken brushwork to Boston, New York and the New England coast. The Little Pond, Appledore (1890) comes from his first summer on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off Maine and New Hampshire, where the poet Celia Thaxter drew artists and writers every year. It's a good reminder that the style traveled, and that some of the finest Impressionist pictures in American museums were painted on American soil.

Who is the most famous Impressionist?

Claude Monet. He gave the movement its name, he kept painting outdoors and in series until the end, and his water lilies are the pictures most people see when they hear the word. Monet described the pull of that approach himself: "One instant, one aspect of nature contains it all." Renoir and Degas come next for most people. My own vote for the most important is Pissarro, the one who stayed through all eight exhibitions. For the most famous single painting, it's a toss-up between the Le Havre sunrise and one of the Giverny water lilies.

Is Van Gogh an Impressionist?

Not quite. Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, the year of the last group show, and stayed two years. His brother Theo, who managed a gallery on the Boulevard Montmartre, introduced him to the work of painters like Monet. His dark Dutch palette, the palette of The Potato Eaters from 1885, gave way to bright color and short brushstrokes. But he never exhibited with the Impressionists, and after Paris he went to Provence and pushed color and line far past anything they did. He belongs with Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat under the Post-Impressionist label: painters who started from Impressionism and left it behind.

Bringing one home

Most of these paintings will never travel, and a few rarely leave their rooms. If one of them has stayed with you, the studio paints every Impressionist canvas it offers by hand in oil, at the size you choose. And if you're still deciding, start with the hundred or so pictures people ask about most.

Sources

• Musée Marmottan Monet, Impression, Sunrise
• National Gallery, London, Impressionism glossary
• The Phillips Collection, Luncheon of the Boating Party
• Art Institute of Chicago, Paris Street; Rainy Day
• The Courtauld, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
• Ashmolean Museum, Pissarro Gallery
• Van Gogh Museum, From Dark to Light