Claude Monet, Impression, soleil levant, 1872

They had no way of knowing it, but somehow they cut adrift from the 19th century by capsizing painting altogether, defying their contemporaries as in a boycott, turning their backs on the Academy and on all the canons. They did not actually baptize themselves as a group, nor did they intend to be anything more than opponents of the jaded, overelaborate, bourgeois art that filled the salons. The generic tag ‘impressionists’ was a swipe taken by Louis Leroy in an article printed in 1874, exactly 150 years ago, in the satirical weekly publication Le Charivari. He wrote with mockery on the group of painters who that year, in the studio of the photographer Nadar, had launched their adventure by founding the ‘Societé anonyme coopérative des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs.’ And weeks later, in the same place, they gathered some of their works to present a whole new way of painting, clearly sailing off the official course...[+]