Impressionism

They chose the genre of landscape because it only referred to nature and nearly all the Impressionists started their artistic itinerary with the landscape. It was a genre that appealed to observation and observation alone, rather than to the imagination, and from observation came the artist’s new view of nature, the logical consequence of all his prior pictorial experience: it was more important to paint what one saw, rather than how one was taught – that was a fact

Courbet was the first serious arsonist: “I have studied the art of the ancients and moderns outside of the system and without taking part in it,” he wrote in the catalogue to his individual exhibition. “I no more wanted to imitate the one than I wanted to copy the other…No! From a full awareness of tradition I simply wanted to draw the intelligent and independent feeling of my own individuality. To know how to, in order to be able to: such was my thinking. To be able to translate the values, ideas, and reality of my time, according to my own understanding; in short, to make a living art, that is my goal.”