Musical Impressionism: The Early History of the Term

Abstract

ON December 27, 1873, a group of artists affixed their signatures to the founding charter of Le Soci~td anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs, and, on April 15 of the following year, the new society offered a public show. One of the works displayed was Claude Monet's Impression: Sunrise (painted in 1872). There is some evidence to suggest that a few critics and painters in this group had used the term impression or impressions in their private discussions of painting for several years prior to this show; indeed the title of Monet's painting supports such a thesis. Nevertheless, it was almost by the whim of a Parisian art critic, Jules Antoine Castagnary, that the Monet painting was to give a name to the collective works of this group of artists. In an article in Le Sihcle, on April 29, 1874, Exposition du boulevard des Capucines les impressionnistes he wrote: ... if one wants to characterize them with a single word that explains their efforts, one would have to create the new term impressionists.1 It appears that the only earlier use of the term impressionism was in connection with the philosophical system of David Hume (1711-1776), but there it had no association with painting or any of the other arts.