Impressionism made its first public appearance in the Salon of 1867. Founded, it is claimed, by Edouard Manet, its aim is to rid art of the trammels of tradition and to look at nature - and to portray her - in a fresh and original manner. Therefore conventionalities in lighting, grouping, etc., are carefully avoided, while personal and immediate "impressions" of nature must be rendered with absolute truth. In the words of one of their ablest exponents, they hold that the eye of the painter "should abstract itself from memory, seeing only that which it looks upon, and that as for the first time, and the hand should become an impersonal abstraction, guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous cunning." In the works of most of the impressionists little selection of subject or care for beauty of color, form, or expression is visible; and their art, touching as it would seem by an instinctive preference on some of the most unlovely aspects of the nineteenth century existence, dealing with the life of the jockey and the ballet-girl, and portraying the worst atrocities of modern costume, has frequently fallen into dire depths of ugliness and vulgarity.

Certain points of resemblance to the aims and methods of the impressionists are to be found in the works of such able painters as J. M. Whistler and J. S. Sargent, and still more distinctly in those of several of the younger Paris-trained English painters who have exhibited in the Suffolk Street Gallery and in the Nineteenth Century Art Club.