Impressionism
On 15 April 1874, painters the Salon had turned down opened their own exhibition on the second floor of 35 Boulevard des Capucines, in the former studio of the photographer Nadar. The name they gave themselves was the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers — a joint-stock company, nothing more. Nobody, in other words, called themselves Impressionists. The critic Louis Leroy wrote a review mocking Monet's Impression, Sunrise, and the painters took the insult and made it their flag: a name born by turning sarcasm into something of their own. Out of the studio, painting the changing light itself. Two things pushed them out there. One was the ukiyo-e that had crossed the sea, with its daring compositions and flat planes of colour — Monet's house still holds some 240 of them. The other was the paint tube. On 11 September 1841 a painter named John Goffe Rand patented a collapsible metal container you could crimp shut. Until then paint was mixed and used up; you could not carry it outdoors. Renoir is said to have told his son Jean: without paints in tubes there would have been no Cézanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro, nothing of what the journalists would later call Impressionism. The tools changed, so painting could go outside. At the same time, on the other side of the world, an imported new blue was deciding the colour of Hokusai's wave. New paint making new pictures was happening on both shores at once. The exhibitions ran to the eighth in 1886, and from there the painters walked their separate ways.