Online Paintings

The most important Barbizon School painter Camille Corot tinted in both a romantic and a realistic vein; his work prefigures Impressionism, as does the paintings of Eugene Boudin who was one of the earliest French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was also an important authority on the young Claude Monet, whom in 1857 he introduced to Plein air painting.

A most important force in the turn towards Realism at mid-century was Gustavo Courbet. In the latter third of the century Impressionists like Eduard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Bethe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Edgar Degas worked in a more direct approach than had previously been exhibited publicly.

Both Manet and Degas reinterpreted classical abstract canons within contemporary situations; in Monet's case the re-imaginings met with aggressive public reception.

Renoir, Morisot, and Cassatt turned to domestic life for inspiration, with Renoir focusing on the female nude. Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley used the landscape as their primary motif, the transience of light and weather playing a major role in their work.

While Sisley most closely adhered to the original principals of the Impressionist perception of the landscape, Monet sought challenges in increasingly chromatic and changeable conditions, culminating in his series of monumental works of Water Lilies painted in Giverny.