... found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history, which was then the accepted source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal of beauty that earlier artists had defined, the impressionists tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original vision that was hard for some people to accept as beautiful. They often painted out of doors, rather than in a studio, so that they could observe nature more directly and set down its most fleeting aspects-especially the changing light of the sun. The impressionists specialized in landscape, informal portraits in a domestic setting, and still life-genres that before the 1870s had been regarded as of lesser importance than history painting. It was a major achievement of the impressionists to overturn this prejudice. Many impressionist landscapes depict unremarkable corners of nature with no obvious point of interest. The core of the earliest ...

See this essay or coursework document in full right now