Impression, Sunrise Fine Art Print

In 1872 Monet returned to his birthplace of Le Havre and, looking out at the harbour from a hotel window at dawn, made a rapid study of the mist, the industrial cranes, the small rowing boats, and the orange disc of the sun reflected on the water below. He submitted it the following year to the first exhibition of the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs — the group that would soon be known as the Impressionists — with the title Impression, Sunrise because he felt it was too sketchy to call a finished view of Le Havre. The critic Louis Leroy saw the title and used it to ridicule the entire exhibition in a satirical review, sneering that if this smudge of a painting was an "impression" then the whole movement deserved to be called Impressionism. Monet and his colleagues adopted the insult as a badge of honour, and the name stuck forever. What Leroy could not see — or refused to see — was that the apparent sketchiness was the entire point. Monet was capturing something that finished academic painting could never hold: the precise quality of light at a specific moment, the way fog and sun and water and industry all dissolved together in the grey-orange half-light of a particular dawn in 1872. Impression, Sunrise was stolen in 1985 and was missing for five years before French police recovered it from a Nice villa. Its return was treated as a major cultural event, which tells you something about how central this relatively small and supposedly "unfinished" painting has become to the story of modern art. It is the work that named a movement, and the movement changed everything.

Claude Monet, 1872