Monet | Impression, Sunrise

About Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet

Monet painted this view of the port of Le Havre, the town he grew up in, in 1872. When it was shown two years later at the first exhibition of the independent group he belonged to, the critic Louis Leroy seized on its title and used it to mock the entire show. He called his review The Exhibition of the Impressionists, and meant it as an insult. The name stuck, and a movement took it.

It is a small painting and a fast one. The sun is a single disc of orange; the water beneath it is a handful of loaded horizontal strokes; the cranes, masts and chimneys of the harbour are barely more than smudges in the mist. In places the canvas shows through. Monet was not describing Le Havre — he later said the picture could not pass for a view of it, which is exactly why he called it an impression.

There is a quirk in it that explains why the sun seems to throb. Measured for brightness rather than colour, the orange disc is almost exactly as luminous as the grey sky around it. The part of your visual system that detects colour sees it clearly; the part that detects brightness barely registers it at all. The result is a sun that will not sit still.

Own a hand-painted Impression, Sunrise

The remarkable thing about this canvas is how little paint is on it. The water is a few dragged horizontal strokes with bare canvas breathing through the gaps; the harbour behind is thinned pigment brushed in wet and left alone. Its whole character is the visible speed of the hand that made it. A print flattens that into an even, uniform film — the same image, but with the gesture and the canvas weave gone. Painted by hand in oils, the marks are marks again, and the picture recovers the looseness that made it scandalous.