Impressionism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Impressionism - Essay Example It started as a movement in painting in France in the late 1860s and various artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley are associated with the founding of this movement. The main features of impressionism as an art movement includes its emphasis on naturalistic landscape, subjective aspect of art, the topics of modern urban life and other commonplace subject matters, portrayal of light in its varying qualities, etc. Most essentially, this movement influenced and inspired trends in other areas such as sculpture, music, and literature. Specifically, impressionism influenced literature in various ways and helped in the growth of literature considerably. As Marlies Kronegger (1973) maintains, impressionism in literature built up its own style and techniques, although painting dominated all the other art forms during the period 1875-85. From the time it originated, it has been one of the prevailing literary styles existent in world literature today and the impressionist creations in various countries are derived from the same basic idea. (Kronegger, 33) Therefore, it is important to maintain that impressionism is one of the key literary terms today as it refers to the literary styles and techniques based on the general framework of impressionism as an art movement. This paper makes a comprehensive exploration of the term impressionism in order to define and explicate impressionism as an extremely valuable rhetorical tool in literature today.