Artists from Impressionism

In class we learned about several different artists who were known to be the original artists for Impressionism. The impressionist style of painting is characterized by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and Edward Degas.
Édouard Manet, lived 1832-1883, was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects. His early works, The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, caused great controversy and served as a principle for young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art. Music in the Tuileries is an early example of Manet's painterly style, it is said to be inspired by his life-long interest in leisure. While the picture was regarded as unfinished by some, the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time.
Here, Manet has depicted his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and he has included a self-portrait among the subjects:

Edgar Degas^, born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas in 1834. Degas was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Degas is known to differ from the Impressionists in that he "never adopted the Impressionist color fleck", and he belittled their practice of painting “en plein air”. Degas explained, "no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing."

"Little Dancer of Fourteen Years" is a sculpture by Edgar Degas, in 1881 of a young dance student named Marie van Goethem. The sculpture was originally made in wax before it was cast in 1922 in bronze. It is built from wax, an unusual choice of material for a sculpture of this time, dressed in a cotton skirt with a hair ribbon, sitting on a wooden base.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist from 1841 to 1919, who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. I found his oil painting, Mme. Charpentier and her children, one of my favorite paintings of his because I felt it showed a sense of closeness between Mme Charpentier and her daughters. Mme. Charpentier and her children was an oil painting on canvas painted in 1878. It is currently on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

 

“Impressionism, http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/impressionism, Feb 1, 2012”