2024 is the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition which opened in Paris on the boulevard des Capucines on 15 April 1874. The Musée d’Orsay is celebrating this anniversary with major exhibition - “Paris 1874 – Inventing Impressionism” (26 March - 14 July 2024) - of 130 works. A selection of works shown in the original show will be juxtaposed to works shown at the Paris Salon of the period, emphasizing the visual shock the new paintings provided to the Paris public, but also establishing more nuanced parallels between the Impressionists and the Salon painters.

In part 3 of our examination of this great exhibition we will concentrate on the birth of the Impressionist landscape. We will see how painters like Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Boudin, De Nittis or Cézanne embraced plein-air [outdoor] painting by concentrating on the visual impact of transitory daylight and bright sunlight rather than the cold, steady light of the studio. By trusting their own visual and emotional reactions to nature they released landscape from centuries of prescribed formulas and brought an excitingly modern vision to the depiction of their world.