The rest is a matter of luck… and the bad judgment of a painter (Leroy) involved in criticism.

One fine day, he left his studio ready to capture the light that was reflected in the waters of the port of Le Havre, as dawn rose over the ships. Therefore, the ability to preserve paint in tubes, which kept the colors alive until they were finished, was a stimulus for painters such as Monet, the artist who gave his name to a style without intending to. Until that year, if a painter took his materials to paint outdoors, he had to carry his pigments in pig bladders. Goffe Rand patented his creation in 1841. This revolutionized the world of painting and strengthened the Impressionist movement. However, Impressionism wouldn’t have existed without the precise moment that led John Goffe Rand, an American painter, to invent the tin paint tube with a screw cap. The paintings by the impressionist artists, with their short and exhausted-looking strokes, would open the door to pointillism, a pictorial technique with dots of color that, seen from a certain distance, define bodies and landscapes. When applied to Impressionist pictorial art, this notion demonstrated how colorful spots - dispersed in appearance - are perceived by our brain in a unitary way. This was a technique that, some time later, in the 20th century, would be called the “gestalt brushstroke,” alluding to Gestalt psychology, a current of modern psychology born to scientifically demonstrate that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” It was a mocking piece that ridiculed the exhibition that had taken place at the independent artists’ salon in Paris, where, among many other works, the painting by Claude Monet - Impression, Sunrise - had stood out.Ĭhanging the meaning of the term coined by Leroy, “Impressionism” came to define a pictorial style, where the vibration of light on bodies was experimented with, by using discontinuous brushstrokes. It was titled: The Exhibition of the Impressionists. At first, the pictorial term “Impressionism” was born to redefine itself… that is, to contradict an article written by the critic Louis Leroy in 1874, in the satirical newspaper Le Charivari. If there’s a pictorial style influenced by a scientific method, that style is Impressionism.

Impression sunrise by claude monet 1874