How the Impressionists became the world's favorite painters, and the most misunderstood

The haystacks have been raked up, the water lilies are clustered; the ballerinas at the Opéra and the revelers at the Moulin de la Galette have taken their places. This year is the 150th birthday of impressionism, a movement so popular and so familiar that it can seem like some preordained crowd pleaser -- all those sunsets and tutus, ready for their blotchy close-ups.

But once, those haystacks were rebellious. Once, those ballet dancers delivered a shock. Can we rediscover what was so revolutionary about impressionism back in 1874? Can we still see the defiance in its beauty, and even its schmaltz?

Right now, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, two very different paintings hang side by side.

One is among the most famous and influential in all of French art. It's Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise.

Monet painted it in 1872, when he was still a young upstart. With a few dozen short, calligraphic horizontals of salmony orange, he rendered the glimmer of the sun on the port of Le Havre, and in soft lilacs, just slightly distinguished from the peach-tinted mauve of the sky, he captured the boats' masts lost in the fog and the half-light.

Now those sense impressions seem exalted, with crowds and prices to match.

But when he painted Impression, Sunrise Monet was a nobody. It drew only modest attention when it went on view in an independent exhibition in April 1874.

The most talked-about painting in Paris that spring was the other one.

It was by the city's most famous artist, academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who imagined a scene from France's royal past: the adviser to Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th century, ignoring the courtiers in a show of power.

Gérôme's edges are crisp, where Monet's are all hazy. His brushwork is invisible, where Monet's is active and advertised. This was what artistic talent was supposed to be in 1874. Drama. Polish. Technique. Not some little sketch of a sunrise over a fisherman's wharf.

The National Gallery's "Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment" is all about the public appraisals of these very different approaches to art making. It's about institutions and reputations. It's about the public and the press. It's about whether cultural change is ever truly a clean handoff from old to new. And it reconstructs not one major exhibition of 1874, but two.

Gérôme was the king of the Salon, the government-sanctioned annual art exhibition that had been France's (indeed Europe's) most significant showcase of new art for longer than two centuries.

The Salon was where reputations were made, where fame was won, where gossip circulated. To see your painting on its walls, you had to get past a tough, traditionalist jury that regularly rejected the boldest artists in Paris, most famously Édouard Manet.

Names you may dimly know -- Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, the all-stars of their day -- produced grand-scale scenes of mythology and history for the Salon, packed as densely as a shed of factory-farmed chickens.

And the National Gallery, which organized this show with the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, is now giving a rare outing to the shellacked, so-bad-they're-good (or maybe still bad) paintings that appeared at the Salon of 1874.

When Monet was getting started, he too wanted to be accepted by the Salon. But by 1874 he could see that the establishment was behind the times. He formed a cumbersomely named cooperative with 30 other independent artists, the Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. (A fair translation would be: "Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers LLC")

They put on their own show, sharing the costs and the profits, in a studio rented from the photographer Nadar.

This sure wasn't the grand hall where the Salon was held. The artists showed on a shopping thoroughfare. A clothing shop and a saddlemaker were on the building's lower floors. The Paris stock exchange was (and still is!) around the corner.

The artists here would be the painters of the emerging bourgeois capital. City of commerce and fashion. City of iron and glass.

Many of their paintings were up-to-the-minute scenes of Parisian life. Monet, with uncommon directness, depicted the very street where the show took place, the Boulevard des Capucines, while Degas painted in Paris' dance studios and Renoir turned to the capital's opera house.

All very familiar now, all very pretty. But "Paris 1874" insists on an important point: Before they were posters in your dentist's waiting room, these were images of postwar life. Monet, Degas, Renoir and the rest had just lived through France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. They had lost friends. Painter Frédéric Bazille, with whom the young Monet shared a studio, died on the front lines.

The capital was besieged. Napoleon III was dethroned. Alsace and Lorraine were lost to the new German Empire. Artist Auguste Lançon, who signed up as an ambulance man when war broke out, was on the front lines the day before Napoleon III's surrender.

Three years later, he reworked that battlefield scene into one of the Salon's many scenes of French patriotism and honor in defeat.

Then, just after the Prussian victory, the artists witnessed the Paris Commune. For two months, a red banner replaced the tricolor flag, until, in May 1871, the French army brought down the revolutionary government in a bloody week of street fighting.

Manet was at the barricades. He lived through the rationing, the cold. He saw the executions.

And in the new Paris that emerged from defeat and civil war, the soon-to-be-impressionists sensed that old aesthetic rules -- and the institutions that governed them -- were losing their authority. The France of the 1870s would be a new society. Degas, painting the rising bourgeoisie at the races, would give it a culture to match.

Their show was not a runaway success. Only 3,500 people bought tickets. (Attendance at the Salon that year: 400,000.) Some critics trashed the show -- impressionism was a critic's sneer for the whole group, mocking Monet's sunrise over the sea for lacking composition and finish.

But the show had its defenders. Several receptive critics saw something vital in the lighter colors, the open brushwork. Camille Pissarro would describe his fellow exhibitors as lovers of "nature, the open air, the different impressions that we experience, all the things we are concerned with.

"All those artificial theories, we repudiate them."

They certainly weren't all rebels -- more like friends of convenience, tired of the Salon's meddling and eager to find buyers directly. And only later did a core band of impressionists emerge from the Société Anonyme.

The show at the National Gallery restores some of the weirdness and idiosyncrasy of 1874, when Monet's and Renoir's impressions appeared alongside more traditional approaches. Zacharias Astruc painted a European woman lounging among ultra-fashionable Japanese imports.

And there were some real outliers, especially among the printmakers.

The first impressionist show also included copies after Renaissance portraiture and, even weirder, a couple of dog pictures.

But on the walls of Nadar's studio, people could see the germ of something.

The details were decomposing, the edges were fading. The old traditions, the old morals, were starting to look bankrupt.

In 1874, the impressionist who most fully foresaw those changes was the show's only female artist, Berthe Morisot, who pushed unfinished composition, and contemporary subject matter, further than any of her colleagues.

In women's lives, and women's fashion, she found the full reflection of modern estrangement. In veils and mirrors, sheer whites and grays, she depicted domestic life and holiday-making as the fraught products of a new commercial society.

Contrasted with the solid Parisiennes on the walls of the Salon, Morisot's downcast mothers and daughters seemed to come from a new century.

The line between one Parisian art world and another, however, was not too bright. Some artists showed in both the impressionist show and the Salon. The Société Anonyme had its conservatives and clunkers, while the Salon had a renegade or two.

Manet -- the most radical painter of the 19th century (and Morisot's brother-in-law) -- declined to show with Monet and the upstarts. He always craved the public accolades of the Salon. Even after his past humiliations there, he went back in 1874 with "The Railway."

Some good it did him. The Salon jury rejected two other Manets in 1874. And the popular press mocked him again. Where was the polish? Where was the train?

Yet it was the very medium of that caricature -- a reproduced image, a mass-media image -- that was going to sound the Salon's death knell. Faster communications. Futuristic technologies. Exotic imports. Industrial fortunes. Something was rumbling in Paris in 1874, something unstoppable.

That first impressionist exhibition included a leisure scene by Henri Rouart, in a Paris suburb now easily reached by train, where two women, carrying parasols bought from a department store, laze in front of a state-of-the-art cast-iron bridge and a smokestack peeks out across the river.

It was 1874, it was a new republic, it was a new world. The artists who became the impressionists took seriously what we now often fear: that when life changes outwardly, culture must change inwardly. In shocking ways, perhaps. At great cost, sometimes. But there is no way out of it. No art worth caring about that is not the image of society.

We're still their heirs. The acceleration, the anomie, the eclipse of king and church by market and media: These modern conditions are so familiar as to be invisible to us now. And it's that familiarity, even more than a hunger for beauty, that today draws such dense crowds -- and vacuous Netflix comedies -- to Monet's garden in Giverny.

Does loving impressionism make me basic? The Washington show, sticking up hard for the old-style Salon pictures, sure suggests that the visual impressions of Monet and Degas were, like "Emily in Paris," overly concerned with superficial things. Cities dissolved into backdrops, persons into objects, as these artists narrowed the task of painting to the recording of what their eyes perceived.

And maybe some of the impressionists' mega-popularity reflects how their beauty lets us ignore the times they sprang from. In 1874, subordinating the outside world to your own passing impression delivered a radical rebuke. In 2024, a water lily is just a water lily.

Yet as art historian Harmon Siegel wrote when this show opened in Paris last spring, "I cannot have the Renoir I admire without the one that embarrasses me." Once capitalist society got going, the critique and the commercial were going to be stuck together for life.

Impressionism is all about how we live in that permanent contradiction. That's what it can teach 21st-century audiences whose hunger for authenticity and antagonism keeps coming up short. And if you find Monet, Renoir, Degas too pretty and popular -- if you think impressionism is the artistic equivalent of a pumpkin spice latte -- I want you to taste the espresso beneath the foam.

Picture No. 107 in the exhibition of 1874 is another of Morisot's lugubrious bourgeois bachelorettes.

Her model is on vacation in Brittany, easily reached from Paris on a new railway line. She carries fashionable accessories, bought in a new retail emporium. The day is calm. The weather is fair.

But her dress is an open tangle of white, as opaque as the brushy harbor, and between her black hat and violet choker is a face dissolving into vapor. No gatekeepers remain to decree how to picture her. Art, from 1874 onward, means freedom: so sad, so beautiful.