The art of painting is as old as the human civilization. It is considered as one of the most creative form of all arts. During different periods of history, different styles of painting were evolved and each type had its own breed of great painters. Impressionism is one such style of painting which was first used by some French artists in the 1870s’. All paintings of this type give an impression of something, not an exact picture of it.
The name impressionism came from Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Sunrise, which was exhibited in 1874 at the first impressionist exhibition. The painters used dabs of pure colours to show objects as they appear in natural lights. They also made use of blobs (drops of liquid colour) and strokes (single movement of a brush). They didn’t paint details as exactly as most other artists did. Another important feature of the impressionists was that they didn’t like painting in a studio, rather they preferred to paint outdoors in natural light. Light was of primary importance to them. Sometimes they painted the same scene several times as the light on it changed throughout the day.
The impressionists hold the view that the principal element in a picture is the light. They followed the principle of simultaneous vision. This means that the human eye will focus only on one small part of any scene at any time and the details within that part will be sharp. Over the rest of the scene details will be less clear. Among the prominent impressionists the foremost are Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley, apart from Monet.
Another important form of painting that began in the 1920s, by the French writer Andre Breton was called Surrealism. This art represented the things in people’s psychological state – hidden deep in people’s mind, or just strange, disturbing ideas and objects, bizarre and sometimes abstract things. Surrealist paintings portrayed the curious distorted world of dreams which Freud thought so important in his psychological studies.