Impressionismo

During the 1870s and 1880s a diverse group of French artists, including Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, adopted a style and a range of themes that challenged the conventional art of the academies and the Salons. The revolutionary nature of Impressionism stemmed from a faith in scientific progress and the individual, creating a vision of art centered on modern life and on immediate visual perception.


Drawing on recently discovered documents - reviews by critics, exchanges of letters between artists, writers and art dealers - Belinda Thomson throws new light on the thinking and on the lives of the Impressionists themselves, examining the factors and experiences that allowed the movement to emerge at that precise moment in history.
Out of the investigation carried out into the family backgrounds of the artists, the importance of the art market and collectors and the influence exercised by the reactions of the critics to the group's exhibitions comes an accessible and exhaustive account, which summarizes the most recent studies into this fascinating and complex artistic phenomenon.


Belinda Thomson studied French history and art at the University of East Anglia and at the Sorbonne in Paris and specialized at the Courtauld Institute in London. She has published monographs on Gauguin and Vuillard and studies of Impressionism and Postimpressionism. She has also published a work on Van Gogh for the Art Institute of Chicago and organized exhibitions on Vuillard and Bonnard, as well as the exhibition on the Birth of Impressionism at Treviso in 2000-01.