Impressionism Art Posters & Prints

Featured Impressionist Fine Artists

Claude Monet was born in 1840 in Paris, France, and died in 1926. He was influenced by Eugene Boudin and Edouard Manet early in his career, and then later during a stay in England at the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) by the British landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable (from the latter of whom was derived the practice of painting wet-on-wet in unmixed colors that was to characterize the Impressionists as a whole). Not long after returning from England, Monet painted Sunrise, Impression, after which the Impressionist art movement was named. [More...]

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in 1841 in Limoges, France, and died in 1926. He worked as a boy in painting designs on china in a porcelain factory, before enrolling in art school in 1862, where he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille (Bazille was killed in 1870 at age 29 in the Franco-Prussian War). Among artists who influenced Renoir are Eugene Delacroix, Camille Corot, and Francois Boucher, as well as by Edouard Manet (the elder figure among the Impressionists who influenced them all). While most of the Impressionist painters primarily focused on landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes, Renoir was known also for his figurative paintings and studies of the female nude. [More...]

Edgar Degas was born in 1834 in Paris, France, and died in 1917. Besides Manet, Degas was influenced by the realism of Gustave Courbet and by the woodblock prints of the Japanese Ukiyo-e artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige. Especially known for his many oils and pastels of ballet dancers, Degas worked primarily in the studio or from a model. Unlike many of the other Impressionists, Degas primarily painted indoor scenes (except for his paintings of horses at the races). He shared a predilection with Renoir for painting the female nude. He also produced very fine bronze scuptures of the human figure using the lost-wax process. [More...]

Edouard Manet was born in 1832 in Paris, France, and died in 1883. In his early career, he studied under Thomas Couture. Like Degas, Manet was influenced early by the realism of Courbet, which focused on painting real people and situations, as opposed to mythological or religious subjects. Luncheon on the Grass, which Manet painted in 1863, was the turning point in his career -- it was refused by the Salon, because of its scandalous depiction of a female nude in company with men in modern dress, but was subsequently displayed in the Salon de Refuses (which Napoleon III had decreed to display the some 6,000 paintings that had been refused exhibition in the Paris Salon, including many paintings by the Impressionists. By this and Through his sister-in-law, the painter Berthe Morisot, he became acquainted with, and influenced, many of the key Impressionist painters. While Manet did not consider himself to be an Impressionist, history has justifiably included him with them. [More...]