French Impressionist Painters

There are many famous French Impressionist painters with works in prestigious museums across the globe. In fact, the painters who created the Impressionist movement were mostly French, including Edouard Manet, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir.

French Impressionism
The Impressionism movement in painting took place during the mid to late 1800s and was partially due to the advent of photography. Painters were ready to break away from creating only realistic pieces and wanted to start capturing what a camera could not; the colorful details of the image.

When the famous painter Edouard Manet was refused a spot in a prestigious gallery for his non-traditional art, a group of experimental French painters led a revolt against the established art salons. They created playful and artistic paintings to evoke the energy of the image without replicating the actual picture. Though initially dismissed as trivial works by critics, the movement grew to what is now considered an important period in art history.

Edouard Manet
Edouard Manet (1832-1883) is known as one of the inspirations for the French Impressionist movement in painting. It was the refusal of his work at a big gallery that ignited other painters into a forceful movement of artistic change. However, Manet did not actually employ impressionist techniques in his paintings until late in his life.

Manet's early works used bold shadows and broke the rules of acceptable female nudes. His painting, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, was considered extremely scandalous for portraying two clothed men picnicking with a naked woman. His last masterpiece was titled A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The painting was primarily realistic work of a barmaid standing in front of a mirror that reflects the busy crowd.

Claude Monet
Claude Monet (1840 to 1926) is one of the most famous of all French Impressionist painters. His 1872 painting, Impression: Sunrise, gave the group of experimental painters their name. Monet never strayed from his soft and emotional painting techniques, creating masterpieces that focused on nature and different types of lighting.

Monet's best known work is a series of large waterlily paintings that he finished and donated to France just before his death. The paintings are considered so important that they are displayed in their own room at the famous Louvre museum in Paris. His abstract strokes create a jumble of subtle colors up close, but form into a portrait of waterlilies in a pond at a distance.

Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) worked closely with Claude Monet and helped create the French Impressionist movement. His paintings used a sense of joy and beauty to portray light and inviting images. One of most famous works is A Girl with Watering Can, which creates a highly impressionistic portrait of a little blonde girl on a garden path.

Renoir was particularly talented at complex compositions that gathered groups of people in a frozen moment. His Le Moulin de la Galette is a perfect example of this talent, with a large gathering of people dancing and dining. Renoir was an avid painter and, by his death, he had created close to 6,000 pieces of work.