At almost every indoor class most students work from photographs, and at least one of them will ask me, ‘How can I paint more loosely?’. What they really mean is, ‘How can I paint like an Impressionist?’.
We know that paintings by the Impressionists were abused and ridiculed when they were first displayed, and it is now accepted that it was the financially and aesthetically daring art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, who turned the tide of public opinion when he took a collection of about 300 works by the group to New York in 1886 and mounted an almost sell-out exhibition. It is doubtful whether any art movement has received a more detailed analysis than that of the Impressionists, but their work is still surrounded by a number of vague assumptions. Was it the new availability of colours in tubes that allowed them to paint subjects in the open air rather than the studio? Was it the intensity
