An Impressionistic View

Sample Paintings

Listed below are some sunset paintings from the French Impressionists. If interested, look up these works and compare their style.

Work of Art
ArtistPaintingYear
Claude Monet The Riverbank at Le Petit Gennevilliers, Sunset 1875
Sunset on the Seine in Winter 1880
The Church at Varengeville, against the Sunset 1882
Willows at Sunset 1889
Paul Cézanne Judgment of Paris 1864
Camille Pissarro Sunset 1872
Setting Sun and Fog, Eragny 1891
Sunset, Rouen 1898
Edouard Manet The Athenauem - Boats at Seat, Sunset 1868
Sunset at Sea 1879
Alfred Sisley Sunset at Port Marley 1876
The Moret Bridge at Sunset 1892

Compared to Realism

An impressionist views the world in a series of colors and lights that suggest a certain form. For example, imagine an actual sunset such as the one shown below.

sunset photo
Sunset photo image © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

An impressionists's mision is not to duplicate reality but convey an impression of a scene.

The next image represents my attempt to reproduce the impressionist style using an archaic paint program - Paint Shop Pro version 6.

An attempt at a painting in Monet style
How an impressionist might represent a sunset. Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.