Impression, Sunrise

1872

Oil on canvas, 50 × 65 cm. Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Le Havre harbor at dawn, painted from a hotel window in autumn 1872. Its one-word title gave the critic Louis Leroy his mocking name for the group.

Monet painted the mist and rising sun in a few hours and showed the canvas in 1874. Impressionist painters often worked this fast, finishing a picture in a single session.
He painted it early one morning from his room at the Hôtel de l'Amirauté.
Look for cranes, chimneys and masts fading into mist behind the rowing boats and orange sun.
Monet titled it Impression because he judged it did not work as a record of the town.
Given to the Musée Marmottan in 1940 by Eugène and Victorine Donop de Monchy.

Le Havre, Monet's hometown, was one of France's main ports for Atlantic ships. Here its smoke and machinery become a study of light and moist air.

impression: Painters' word for a quick record of overall light and atmosphere, not detail.

Themes

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain