Impressionism: Six Key Works and Their Cultural Meaning

Introduction and Background

Known for its radical departure from traditional aesthetics in painting and the decorative arts, Impressionism was a movement deeply rooted in its ideological, cultural, political, and sociological context. The characteristic visual features of Impressionist painting include experimentation with untraditional colors and styles that signal the early transition towards non-representational forms. Subject matters in Impressionist art shifted from depicting officially sanctioned people, places, and symbols towards capturing snapshots of daily life. Beyond its core aesthetics, which vary from artist to artist, Impressionism also highlighted changing social hierarchies related to race, class, and gender. Artists no longer worked solely on commission from religious or political patrons but also from a burgeoning bourgeoisie.

The diversity within Impressionism draws attention to the ways the movement manifested differently across geographic regions, although it remained firmly rooted in France and centered in Paris. From its beginnings in the 1870s until its shift towards post-Impressionism around the 1890s, Impressionism encapsulates the artistic zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. This gallery presents six quintessential Impressionist works of art.

Edouard Manet's Olympia

Rendered in oil on canvas, Manet's Olympia embodies many of the most striking features that characterize Impressionism. As Gilman (1985) points out, Olympia deconstructs and confronts social hierarchies and realities by depicting a bold female courtesan attended by her Black servant. In doing so, Manet could be inadvertently commenting on white privilege as well as on female sexuality. The subject represents the modern "defiant heroine," signaling the birth of the feminist movement (Flescher, 1985).

Depicting the female nude was nothing new in the nineteenth century, but rendering her in a way that is neither idealized nor fully denigrated did mark a departure from how women had been portrayed in past European painting. The voyeurism of the "male gaze" is subverted, as the woman in Manet's painting stares back at the viewer, aware of her power in eschewing traditional gender norms (Snow, 1989). Unlike the portraits commissioned by the wealthy, Olympia depicts a woman taking pleasure in her own power — a stance that could have been considered a threat to the prevailing social order.

Berthe Morisot's The Cradle

Berthe Morisot's The Cradle depicts a snapshot of female life in late nineteenth-century France that differs markedly from the one Manet provides in Olympia. Rendered in oil on canvas, the painting shows a woman gazing upon her child. As Jacobus (1995) points out, not only is the theme of motherhood salient in Morisot's work, but so too is the motif of mirroring and gazing. Interestingly, mirroring and gazing also appear in Manet's Olympia, in which the subject holds a hand mirror while gazing directly at the viewer.

In The Cradle, the mirroring is implied in the way the mother sees herself in her own child. The mother does not engage the viewer at all; it is as if the viewer peeks at her from behind a door, catching a glimpse of what maternal life, maternal instincts, and maternal feelings must be like. It is also worth noting that, like Manet and the other Impressionists, Morisot captures the life of the bourgeois woman rather than that of the working class. The rendering of light and Morisot's brushwork are also categorically Impressionistic.