The nineteenth-century French painting movement — Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, and others — that broke with the official Paris Salon to paint modern life outdoors in quick, visible strokes of bright, unmixed color. Chasing changing light rather than polished historical subjects, and aided by the new portable paint tube, it opened the threshold of modern art. Its name was borrowed from a hostile review of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1874).
The name was meant as an insult. In 1874 a critic stood before Claude Monet's hazy harbor scene, titled Impression, Sunrise, and sneered that it was no finished painting at all, just an impression. The artists he mocked were already outcasts. The official Paris art world wanted dark, polished pictures of noble subjects, and these painters offered the opposite: bright, quick, sketchy scenes of ordinary modern life, made outdoors in the changing light. So they took the insult and wore it. The name stuck, and what began as a critic's sneer became the label by which the movement was remembered. Within a generation the daubers had won, and their loose, light-filled way of seeing had become the threshold of modern art.