Impression, Sunrise

Claude Monet painted *Impression, Sunrise* in 1872, depicting the port of Le Havre, the artist’s hometown. The work debuted in April 1874 at a Paris exhibition organized by the group “Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc.,” which included Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. That show, featuring over two hundred works, drew about 4,000 visitors—and some harsh critics. The painting is widely recognized for giving the Impressionist movement its name.

Monet visited Le Havre in northwestern France in 1872 and produced a series of seven canvases showing the port at various times of day, from various angles—some from the water itself, others from a hotel room overlooking the harbor. *Impression, Sunrise* became the most famous of these. It is normally housed at the Musée Marmottan Monet. In 1985, it was stolen by Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun, recovered in 1990, and returned to display in 1991. It was on loan at the Musée d’Orsay from March 26 to July 14, 2024, and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., from September 8, 2024, to January 19, 2025.

Monet said he chose the title *Impression, Sunrise* because of the painting’s hazy style: “They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn’t really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: ‘Put Impression.’” Art historian Paul Smith suggests Monet may have used the word to deflect accusations that the work was unfinished or lacked detail—though such criticism came anyway. The term “impressionism” was not new; it had been used to describe effects in paintings from the Barbizon School, and artists like Daubigny and Manet had applied it to their own work. In a review of the 1874 exhibition for the newspaper *Le Charivari*, critic Louis Leroy used “Impressionism” to label the new style, singling out Monet’s painting as typical. Before the 1860s, “impressionism” referred to the effect of a natural scene on a painter, or of a painting on a viewer. By the 1860s, “impression” was transferred to describe a painting that conveyed such an effect, and later the entire movement. Though initially used dismissively, the term “was immediately taken up by all parties,” and Monet’s work is seen as capturing the movement’s start and name.