The theft of nine paintings, including Renoir's "Bathers" and Monet's "Impression, Soleil Levant," which gave Impressionism its name, from the Marmottan Museum, Paris, took place on Sunday.
Within a decade, the man who gave Impressionism its name was outpacing even Corot, throwing the old-fashioned Academic virtues of finish to the winds in works such as La Pointe de la Hève, Sainte-Adresse (1864).
Fry, who gave Post-Impressionism its name, regarded Cézanne as the founder of a new Modernist aesthetic a new formalism, in which, as he wrote in Vision and Design (1920), "plasticity has become all-important" and in which "all is reduced to the purest terms of structural design".
The sketchy brushwork in dots and short strokes of Impressionism gives way to broad dashes of paint applied as if in a fit of rage.
Last month at Sotheby's April 11 sale, "Rice Marsh, Lichtfield Plantation," done in 1970, doubled the high estimate as it sold for just over $34,000 — the sunny colors of early Impressionism give it an easier appeal.
An exhibition held in the studio of the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) in 1874 included Monet's picture Impression: Sunrise, and it was this work that, by being disparaged as mere "impressionism," gave a name to an entire movement.
Once his mastery over the brush became more pronounced, impressionism gave way to realism, a facet of his practice he seems deeply proud of: "What I truly love about painting in a hyper-realistic mode is the skill and craftsmanship that goes into it.
Given the decline of interest in Impressionism in the meantime, the price realized last night was remarkably high.
At the brink of his death's centennial, his work is never far from the art museum limelight, given the continuing popularity of French Impressionism.
The repetitive and amorphous trends of Impressionism had in fact already given grounds for such a supposition.
