and Eugéne Delacroix. In Turner’s works, colour took precedence over the realistic portrayal of form; Delacroix led the way for the Impressionists to use unmixed hues. The transition between Romanticism and Impressionism was provided by a small group of artists who lived and worked at the village of Barbizon. Their naturalistic style was based entirely on their observation and painting of nature in the open air. In their natural landscape subjects, they paid careful attention to the colourful expression of light and atmosphere. For them, colour was as important as composition, and this visual approach, with its appeal to emotion, gradually displaced the more studied and forma, with its appeal to reason. Impressionism grew out of and followed immediately after the Barbizon school. A distinctive feature of the work of the Impressionists was the application of paint in touches of mostly pure colour rather than blended; their pictures appeared more luminous and colourful even than the work of Delacroix, from whom they had learned the technique. To the modern eye, the accepted paintings of the salon artists of the day seem pale and dull. Like the paintings of the Barbizon school, much of their painting was done outdoors, in an attempt to capture the fleeting impression of the play of light at a certain moment. The first Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1874. Prominent among the Impressionists were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Eugéne Boudin, and Gustave Caillebotte. Impressionism is thought to be ‘…the fruit of the scientific thought and research of the nineteenth century’ . One of the principles of the movement was that they substituted the natural chiaroscuro of the colour that was based on the solar spectrum for one that was based more on tones of black and white. It was this principle that has affected painting ever since and most profoundly . It was accompanied by the shock of discovering something new, although earlier paintings, such as those of the Barbizon School had been heading towards the same direction. Most people, even today, relate light with the colour white and darkness with black. Painters of the past have used black in an effort to dim a specific colour, and white to order to lighten it. Scientific knowledge has left us with a complete understanding of how the human eye works, and optics has given painters the opportunity to manipulate light more effortlessly. Thus, we have learnt that white light can be resolv

Some topics in this essay:
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