On April 25, 1874, French critic Louis Leroy mocked Claude Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), scathingly comparing the seascape to “wallpaper in its embryonic state.” He was writing in response to an exhibition staged in defiance of the state-sponsored Salon by 31 artists—including Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas. These artists became the target of Leroy’s mockery as painters of unfinished “impressions,” a characterization that would unwittingly christen the Impressionist movement.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of that historic insult and the exhibition that introduced Impressionism, as it would eventually be known, to the public. In celebration, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has curated a massive exhibition entitled “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” on view until July 14th, which features over 130 works from Impressionists including Monet, Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro. From there, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in September.
The exhibition underlines the significance of these artists’ innovations to the course of art history. Impressionism shattered the conventions of its time by favoring the transient, dynamic qualities of light and color in everyday scenes over detailed renderings of academic subjects. Its practitioners used unblended bursts of color, loose brushwork, and plein air techniques to capture the world as they observed it at specific moments in time.
Today, the legacy of Impressionism lives on in contemporary artists who incorporate techniques and themes developed by Monet, Degas, and their contemporaries—as well as the Post-Impressionist generation that followed them—to convey a sense of immediacy.
Here, we explore the work of 10 contemporary artists whose practices are linked to the Impressionists’ legacy.
B. 1960, Florence, Italy. Lives and works in Italy.
In Beatrice Meoni’s cluttered interiors, haphazard strokes of color, rather than clear lines, articulate the forms of furniture, clothing, and scattered belongings. The Florence-born painter’s loose brushstrokes obscure the definition and details of her rooms, instead depicting the space as if seen in a passing glance. Though absent of any figures, her scenes are clearly inhabited, imbued with a sense of lived experience.
Like her Impressionist predecessors, Meoni captures fleeting moments of everyday life, as in her “Lo Studio” series (2024), where the painter explores her own workspace. There is a quality of spontaneity in her paintings, like in Lo studio. Pranzo (2024), which depicts a room piled with discarded belongings alongside a studio table scattered with plates. It feels almost as if Meroni stopped eating in the middle of dinner to capture the moment.
Her “Lo Studio” works were recently featured in an exhibition hosted by Cardelli & Fontana. Another work from the series is currently included in a group exhibition at z2o Galleria in Rome.
B. 1962, Meaux, France. Lives and works in Barcelona.
The somber portraits of Barcelona-based painter Daniel Enkaoua incorporate elements of Impressionism and Expressionism, imparting a sense of tragedy or malaise through dramatically lit figures rendered in choppy, visceral marks. His subjects often feel removed from reality, placed against a vacuous background. Liel allongé regardant vers le ciel (2020–21), for example, illustrates a figure lying on the ground, expressionless and staring above. Enkaoua’s textured brushstrokes obscure the figure, evoking a dissociative state in which the world feels out of focus.
Natan en capuche violette (2024), a portrait of a hooded boy, bears an eerie resemblance to Monet’s devastating 1879 portrait of his dying wife, Camille Monet on Her Deathbed. Of that work, Monet said, “I was at the deathbed of a lady who had been, and still was, very dear to me.…I found myself staring at [her] tragic countenance, automatically trying to identify things like the proportions of light.” Both paintings make light and shadow, more than the subjects themselves, the focal points.
Other works by Enkaoua, like Trois légumes (2022), recall Impressionist still lifes, laying vibrant colors side by side in short strokes to animate subjects like grapes, melons, or vegetables freshly plucked from the garden. Several such works are included in a current group exhibition, “Wind Words,” at Litvak Contemporary in Tel Aviv.
B. 1991, Long Beach, California. Lives and works in Detroit.
Using pure, bright colors and intuitive brushwork, American painter Paul Verdell pushes the Impressionist pursuit of transient beauty towards abstract expression. This impulse is unmistakable in A Road to Glory (2022), an oil painting of a vivid red, orange, and yellow skyscape above a lush green expanse. In this work, Verdell immerses himself in the natural world, capturing it en plein air, but rendering it as if all the elements are melting together.
A Road to Glory reflects a recent shift in Verdell’s practice away from predominantly figurative works. His earlier portraits, like Najee and a Lemon Tree (2020), employ Impressionist and Fauvist techniques, including quick, gestural markmaking and non-naturalistic color, lending the works vibrance and a sense of immediacy.
Verdell is represented by the Detroit gallery Library Street Collective, where his work is currently on view in a joint exhibition with Allana Clarke. Last year, he participated in Kehinde Wiley’s prestigious Black Rock Senegal residency, and mounted solo shows at Bode in Berlin and Jupiter Contemporary in Miami.
B. 1983, Lahore, Pakistan. Lives and works in New York.
Within Salman Toor’s tranquil interior scenes is a modern echo of the Impressionists’ attention to café culture. Instead of Parisian cafés, the artist—hailing from Pakistan and now residing in New York—focuses on the metropolitan bars and parties he encounters in everyday life. These paintings, often defined by a stark emerald color field, frame their scenes similarly to the Impressionist café paintings, where the scenes seem to spill beyond what’s immediately visible in the frame.
Toor’s The Bar on East 13th (2019) alludes to Edouard Manet’s famous Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882), which captures a barmaid at a Parisian nightclub, her customer—ostensibly, the viewer—reflected in the mirror behind the bar. Toor replicates Manet’s perspectival trick in a work that uses fluid, unruly forms to capture the liveliness of a fleeting moment of urban life.
During this year’s Mexico City Art Week, Toor was featured in a group exhibition hosted by MASA Galería and Luhring Augustine, the latter of which represents him. His work is currently on view in an exhibition mounted by the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
B. 1975, Deauville, France. Lives and works in Paris.
At first glance, Thomas Andréa Barbey’s paintings most obviously reference the Post-Impressionist Pointillist tradition. He employs a meticulous technique, using dots of tempera paint on paper to illustrate how light moves across both sweeping landscapes and intimate interiors.
Soleil Couchant sur la Mer de l’Ouest (2023), with its myriad pure color dots, captures a luminous seascape where the setting sun dances across the ocean, clouds, and distant mountains. The work recalls Paul Signac’s Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice (1905), another waterscape with an incandescent skyline heated by a gradient of yellow, orange, and red. Barbey’s use of precise, controlled flecks of color gives the sense that he is distilling his scenes down to their most essential elements.
Barbey’s work is frequently shown with sobering, which represents him in Paris. He hosted his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2022, and is included in its current group show “Chapter II.”
B. 1966, Bangalore, India. Lives and works in Chicago.
After majoring in engineering at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Soumya Netrabile made a massive career change when she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Today, the artist takes daily walks through the forests in the suburbs of Chicago, where she lives and works. These walks inform her paintings: colorful landscapes awash in greens, oranges, browns, and yellows.
“I really wanted to understand how to take something I was looking at and then make it happen with paint,” Netrabile, who was featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2023–2024, said of her choice to focus on painting from life and observation. Her motivation mirrors the Impressionists’ desire to capture their sensory impressions rather than narrative or imagined content.
Now represented by Anat Ebgi, Netrabile creates atmospheric, hazy paintings that offer a glimpse of the world around her without the use of stark lines. 2pm In the Park (2023), depicting two figures seated beneath a tree, is a fluid natural landscape where Netrabile’s gestural brushwork conjures a sense of transience. The work was featured in “Between past and present/Between appearance and memory,” Netrabile’s 2023 solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi. Next month, the artist will open a new solo show at Andrew Rafacz in Chicago.
B. Boston. Lives and works in New York City.
A 2020 NYSCA/NYFA artist fellow, Sue Collier has lived and worked in New York for nearly 30 years. During the spring and summer months, she paints small plein air landscapes in Central Park. Collier’s speckled canvases capture the vibrant greens of the park’s foliage in lively, impressionistic portrayals of urban nature. Works like Central Park Road II (2014) often leave the blue sky out of frame, focusing instead on how shifting light touches the earth and alters the landscape’s hues.
“When outdoors, I paint with an imperative and urgency and am driven by the pressure of time dictated by light and energy,” Collier wrote in her artist statement. This approach extends to her figurative pieces: bustling leisure scenes of parkgoers or sunbathers at the beach, rendered with daubs of color. Occasionally, the passing figures seem to merge with the natural landscape.
B. 1990, South Africa. Lives and works in Cape Town.
South African artist Mia Chaplin paints with free and unpredictable brushstrokes, echoing the spontaneity of Impressionist paintings. Her most frequently recurring subjects are female figures, often depicted tangled together without clearly rendered features. Her agitated, impasto brushwork nods to a level of subjectivity and emotionality in her paintings, calling back to Post-Impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh. These works are meant to evoke the tumultuous nature of female existence—specifically referencing intimate partner violence experienced by women in South Africa.
Chaplin’s 2023 triptych The Protected Circle, I, II, III applies these techniques at a monumental scale. The artist evokes a sense of movement and burgeoning change through her expressive marks. The work was featured in a solo presentation with WHATIFTHEWORLD at Untitled Art Miami Beach in December—one of Artsy’s favorite booths at the fair. Chaplin also participated in the prestigious Fountainhead Residency program in Miami last year.
B. 1977, Salisbury, England. Lives and works in London.
Hannah Brown lived in the countryside of western England until she turned 19, when she left to study sculpture at Central Saint Martins in London and later at the Royal College of Art. After a period spent making installation and text-based work, she took up landscape painting. The artist attributes her fascination with the genre—specifically, with vistas that study the psychological connections humans have with nature—to her bucolic upbringing. Her landscape paintings do not capture immense vistas, but rather the shadowy corners of nature; often, the viewer’s perspective is of someone peering out from the brush.
“I can’t imagine painting a view that I haven’t seen firsthand. I just wouldn’t have a connection with it,” Brown said in an interview with Berlin Art Link. While she works from reference images in her studio rather than outdoors, her emphasis on firsthand observation mirrors Impressionist priorities.
In “Hollow Pond,” her solo exhibition on view at Anat Ebgi through April 20th, Brown presents a series of paintings of the titular pond, located near her home in London. The artist returns to the same subjects as the days and the seasons change, like Monet with his haystacks and water lilies. This approach imbues her landscapes with a sense of time and urgency that reflects the ever-changing moods of the natural world.
B. 1968. Lives and works in New York.
“I stand in the landscape at my easel looking for an unusual light, structure, or form. The focus is on what I see, not on what I think I see,” Kamilla Talbot, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, has said of her approach to painting landscapes. Splitting her time between New York and the Catskill Mountains, Talbot brings to her soft, bright watercolor paintings a keen focus on the transient nature of her subjects.
Talbot zooms in and out on the natural landscape, applying her quick, vigorous brushstrokes with varying degrees of precision. Against the Wind (2024), with its broad swaths of color and wide horizon, leans towards abstraction. Meanwhile, Cornflower Tangle (2023) uses more controlled marks and a tightly cropped composition to capture its sun-kissed botanical subject. In both, Talbot brings an Impressionist’s fascination with the ephemeral qualities of light and its effects on color.
Next month, Talbot is presenting a new work in “Glimpses of Spring,” an online exhibition presented by BOOM Contemporary, exclusively on Artsy.
Browse available works in the collection “Contemporary Impressionism.”
Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb is Artsy’s Staff Writer.
