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You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and the one the French Impressionists made during their debut exhibition wasn’t great. French painting, at that time, was centered on what was shown at the Salon (the annual official exhibition sponsored by the French government): mostly realistic images of mythological or historic events. The Salon was built around unspoken rules about what could and couldn’t be done. This code of conduct would meet its end at the first exhibition of the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers, as the Impressionists first dubbed themselves—not just by what their canvases depicted but how they unveiled those canvases to the public.

The first rule the Impressionists broke was how they treated light: as a subject in and of itself, often painting its effects outdoors (en plein air) with pure colors straight from the commercial paint tube (an innovation invented only a couple decades earlier), applied in loose, sketchy brushstrokes. French academic paintings were flat, created in studios, and had no visible brushstrokes hinting at the labor of the artist; Impressionist works, by comparison, were repositories of unctuous globs and smears that looked, to some of their contemporaries, more like palettes than finished canvases.

The second rule they broke was what they painted: modern life (as opposed to mythological gods, religious saints, and lionized emperors of the past). Claude Monet, a founding member of the group, included railway lines and factories in his landscapes; Mary Cassatt, an American-born member, painted urban forms of entertainment such as the opera; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir (the Impressionist everyone loves to hate) depicted shadow-speckled outdoor dance parties.

Decorum dictated that these artists apply to the Salon and wait patiently to learn whether the jury approved their paintings for exhibition. But the rebellious Impressionists, whose brazen works were repeatedly rejected from the Salon, decided to mount their own show instead.

30 artists banded together as the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and rented the top-floor studio of photographer Nadar at 34 Boulevard des Capucines. On April 15, 1874, they opened an exhibition of 165 artworks. Over the next 12 years, the collective organized eight group exhibitions, gaining slightly more acceptance each time. But the severe, negative reaction their first exhibit inspired would stand the test of time; in fact, a resulting insult would help brand them forever.

“A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”

As soon as the group unveiled its inaugural show, critics were polarized. While some praised their choice to depict modern life, others were incensed by their style. Louis Leroy, among the latter, published a review just ten days after the show’s opening that consisted mostly of a conversation he had with academic landscape painter Joseph Vincent while walking through the exhibition.

If Leroy was apprehensive about the merits of this new crop of artists, Vincent was downright convinced that they couldn’t be trusted even to produce wallpaper patterns. The pair first walked by a Renoir, and then a snowy landscape by Camille Pissarro that Vincent described as “palette scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas.” The impression was there, Leroy argued, to which Vincent answered, “well, it is a funny impression!”

The brunt of Vincent’s verbal attack was reserved for Monet, though, whose painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) was number 98 in the exhibition catalog. “I glanced at [Vincent]; his countenance was turning a deep red. A catastrophe seemed to me imminent, and it was reserved to M. Monet to contribute the last straw.” Vincent asked Leroy the name of the painting, and after hearing it said, “impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it… and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape.”

Not all critics agreed with Vincent’s analysis, though. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, writing in the same year, flipped Leroy’s pejorative term on its head to praise the new group. “They are ‘impressionists’ in the sense that they render not the landscape, but the sensation produced by the landscape,” Castagnary wrote. In other words, their images transcended cold visual truth.

By 1877, three years after Leroy’s disparaging review, many of the Impressionists adopted his moniker as their own. That year Émile Littré included the word impressioniste in the supplement of his eponymous dictionary, cementing it into common terminology.

The Batignolles Group

So who, exactly, were “the Impressionists”? Technically, they were a loosely affiliated bunch of independent types, unified mostly by their autonomy from the official Salon. Founding members included Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Monet, and Pissarro. However, other artists who later became Post-Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists—such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Georges Seurat—also participated in the early Impressionist exhibitions.

Many of these painters met regularly at the bohemian Café Guerbois, where they kept up on each other’s work, coordinated future shows, and, at times, had heated debates (Édouard Manet and Degas were especially renowned for their arguments there). The Impressionists’ presence at this cheap hangout was so reliable that writer Emile Zola gave them an alternate name: The Batignolles Group (after the Parisian neighborhood where the café was located and many of its regulars lived).

As a collective, these artists had eight shows. The last of these was in 1886, at which point many of the Impressionists focused on solo careers, participated in small group shows arranged by gallery dealers, or began offshoots of the movement.

“A young branch has developed on the old tree trunk of art,” French art critic Louis Edmond Duranty wrote in defense of the new style during its second exhibition, at the Durand-Ruel Galleries in 1876. “Will it cover itself with leaves, flowers, and fruits? Will it extend its shade over future generations? I hope so. What, then, have they produced? A color scheme, a kind of drawing, and a series of original views.”