On its 150th anniversary, Impressionism is surprisingly relevant

THE WORLD was not always an arena of Claude Monet superfans. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” sneered Louis Leroy, an art critic, when describing Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”. The painting of a hazy port in Normandy was hung in a show put on by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers Etc that opened on April 15th 1874. Some of the comments about the sketchy style adopted by Monet and some of his fellow “rebels” were so acerbic that they sound more like put-downs from social-media trolls than professional art commentary. An “appalling spectacle of human vanity losing its way to the point of dementia” was how another critic in the 1870s described the new style.

The Anonymous Society’s show 150 years ago is remembered as the Impressionist movement’s birth; it was then that the painters were called “Impressionist” by Leroy, though the artists would not claim the label themselves for another couple of years. (An impression was a sketch, in the lingo of painters in 1874.) That show is now the subject of another exhibition, “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism”, which recently opened at the Musée d’Orsay. In September it will travel from Paris to the National Gallery in Washington, DC.