Richard Shiff's essay, " Defining 'Impressionism' and the 'Impression' "

Report on Richard Shiff's essay, " Defining 'Impressionism' and the 'Impression' "
(Based on class lecture by Anil.J.Pinto on 27th September, 2010)
There is no proper generic approach to defining 'Impressionism' and the way
Impressionistic style in art can be attributed to artists. Richard Shiff illustrates this idea
by elucidating that it is difficult to define Impressionistic art, or for that matter, how artists
can be classified according to the strictness of the genre. Art historians have rendered
the title impressionism that rarely gives any exclusive definition that can be readily
appreciated. There is no historical fixity or a continuum that can be assigned to be
impressionistic. To consider who the real impressionists are, historians have looked into
a simple classification: (1) Social group (2) artists subject matter (3) style or technique
(4) purpose. Yet each of these categories has presented their own difficulties.
An artist must, in order to be Impressionistic, associate with the group of artists
who render similar thoughts. An artist might be labeled an Impressionist if the artist
participates, voluntarily, in one of the social groups to get conferred. Artistic styles then
may develop and become group styles, and if a person is too deviant, may become an
individualist impressionist. Such professional association and personal sympathy made
Degas an impressionist and Cezanne, another Impressionist, even though, modern
critics find his style antithetical to Impressionism. Yet, Impressionism also existed
outside the circles of the groups; the circle of the elite, such as the society of Salon. By
such association, the Salon society declared Corot as a superior poetic kind of
impressionist.
It is in the subject matter of the art that art can be classified in genres. When they
are classified in such a manner, Shiff comments, they lead to awkward inclusions and
exclusions. By this standard a Stanislas Lepine was included with later impressionists,
but today, he is rarely discussed as a genuine impressionist, because he lacks the the
major stylistic characteristic of the impressionists the unconventional bright colours.
Theodore Duret who tended to use stylistic criteria in order to classify the various
painters, excluded Lepine for just this reason when he wrote his early account of the
Impressionist movement. Duret and Riviere implied that it had simply been necessitated
by the concern for a more accurate observation of nature. Impressionism allows for
individuality in to the perspectives of nature but also tends to depict that the colours
drawn are from nature directly, to make it as close to nature. It is this verisimilitude that
makes Impressionism a difficult genre to categorize because the particular sensation is
all pervading.
Impressionistic art, thus, is sense observation and self interpretation of the
ultimate aesthetic goal. The definitions of the goal of impressionist art may indeed
inform more purposeful distinctions in the other areas of investigation; yet one must take
in account that early observers of the impressionists like Jules Castagnary and
Theodore Duret, said that these artists hardly spoke about the goals and aims of their

works. Castagnary in 1874 observed: the object of art does not change, the means of
translation alone is modified.
Shiff, throughout his essay, establishes the idea that an artistic theory, like
Impressionism, cannot classify the modulus of art or bring into a strict pattern an artists
intent and creation. Impressionism, as a analyzed from the essay, is thus a style of
depicting, creatively and instinctively, not professionally, creating the first impressions
that comes to mind when a particular strain of thought gets depicted. This manner or
style was directed at something, at the expression of a fundamental truth, the verite,
so often mentioned in theoretical and critical documents of the period. When
impressionism was considered as depiction of naturalism, which was not new, these
artists seemed to set the art apart by their technical devises. For the impressionist, as
the name applies, the concept of impression provided the theoretical means for the
approaching the relation of individual and universal truth.
It may be just depicting the shallow waters or the primary layer of thought that a
particular event or an aesthetic consciousness generates in an artist. Shiff is
commendably exemplary when he distinguishes photography and Art in the context of
Impressionism, as defining it to be an imprint. The elementary difference between
photography and art is in the medium of reproduction, which is the essence of all art.
Photography is capturing the moment in time as an imprint but art is always contoured
by artists ego, the creative psyche and personal interpretation of the flux from where the
artists draws inspiration. The "Impression" is always a surface phenomenon, immediate,
primary, and undeveloped. Hence the term was used for the first layer of an oil painting,
the first appearance of an image that might subsequently become a composite of many
such impressions.
It is in the ability to catch the primary idea of the flux that inspires the artists
creativity that impressionistic art becomes successful. As primary and spontaneous, the
impression could be associated with particularity, individuality, and originality. The
artists ability to infer from the facts that generate aesthetic thought gives art its
ingenuity. Impressionism is in the synthesis of nature and original sensation. In
Deschanels usage, the term impression, which one might first regard as reference to
very concrete external events, is extended into the more internalized realm of character,
personality, and innate qualities. The romantic critic Theophile Thore similarly allowed
the term to bridge the gap between the external and the internal, the physical and the
intellectual or the spiritual, when he used it to explain how poetry differed from imitation.
Poetry is not nature but the feeling that nature instills in a poet, the impression that gets
recorded in a special language. In other words we can never have absolute knowledge
of the external world in the manner one does have absolute knowledge of an
impression: it would reveal as much truth about the world as an impression does.
The self of the artist in any form of art cannot be denied because it forms the
essence of all artistic interpretation, though the artist plays the role of an observant
spectator, which also entails an investigation into the concepts of the genre. The

impression then can be both a phenomenon of nature and of the artists own being. It
was not until the nineteenth century that psychology, the study of sensation, emotion,
and thought came to be recognized not only as a branch of metaphysics, but as natural
science, as an area of empirical research, into the physiology of perception and then in
turn, to impression. A standard definition of impressionism was in accord to David
Humes use of the term that "impression is the effect produced on the bodily organs by
the action of external object." Shiff also warns us about us misjudging impressionism
with symbolism, where the latter depends more on hidden layers of meaning or
interpretation. Shiff does this by drawing a clear distinction between Manet and Monets
artistic depiction of thought patterns. Where Manets depiction of impressions on the
mind was objectively portrayed by solid brush strokes, monet was subjective to his
aesthetic rendering.
The essay is conclusively remnant of the theory that art is a projection of the
artists self and this must be true to the nature of creation. Impressionism is then,
perhaps the artists impression on nature and not natures impression on the artist.