Impression, Sunrise (1872) - Claude Monet
Oil on cancas, 48 x 63 cm, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
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The French painter Claude Monet took a decisive step towards Impressionism in 1872 with his work Impression, Sunrise. Monet painted many pictures in which the sun was either rising or setting. However, this painting was a shock for art lovers at the time, as the recognized contemporary painting was more concerned with reality, photo-realism was the aim. This painting, however, clearly departs from this.

It shows the harbor of Le Havre, a city in the northwest of France, in the morning. In the foreground you can see small, more or less clearly outlined boats. Further back, the shapes become increasingly abstract and blurred. Only the rising sun can be recognized as a clearly defined circle. Mainly shades of blue, gray and violet were used to make the morning fog perceptible. The sun and its reflection on the water, on the other hand, shine in orange-red.

A group of painters, consisting of just over 30 artists, one of whom was Monet, asked themselves
questions that were atypical for the time and did not meet with enthusiasm everywhere.
Is the sea the same in the morning as it is in the evening? Such questions and their generally new approach meant that their works were rejected by the Paris Salon and from then on they worked independently. Her motivation was not to eliminate her sensations, but rather to train herself to perceive and counteract the changes in nature and in herself.

The picture appears as if it had been translated directly from the eye into the artist's hand, resulting in an unadulterated reproduction of the moment in a very short space of time. The aim was to depict the objective visual impression. The spatial distance is only created by the diagonally arranged boats in the foreground. The masts and chimneys of the industrial plants towering in the background serve as additional structural elements.

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