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Impressionism

Pronunciation: /ɪmˈprɛʃ(ə)nɪz(ə)m/

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Definition of Impressionism

noun

[mass noun]
  • a style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, especially in terms of the shifting effect of light and colour.
  • a literary or artistic style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve accurate depiction.
  • Music a style of composition (associated especially with Debussy) in which clarity of structure and theme is subordinate to harmonic effects, characteristically using the whole-tone scale.

The Impressionist painters repudiated both the precise academic style and the emotional concerns of romanticism, and their interest in objective representation, especially of landscape, was influenced by early photography. Impressionism met at first with scorn, but soon became highly influential. Its chief exponents included Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Degas

Origin:

from French impressionnisme, from impressionniste, originally applied unfavourably with reference to Monet's painting Impression: soleil levant (1872)

Impressionism in other Oxford dictionaries

Definition of Impressionism in the US English dictionary

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