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The Pre-Impression: Oil Studies and Oil Sketches

The Impressionists were inspired by a long tradition of rapid painting in European art. Old Master oil sketches and open-air landscape paintings by Barbizon artists served as powerful precedents, even if such works were usually made as studies for highly finished and, indeed, slowly painted works. Pissarro's Study of a Sunset, Pointoise, although signed and dated, nevertheless has much in common with Corot's Well among the Dunes, a typical oil sketch from nature. In each case the artists applied paint quickly and loosely, their brushes loaded with pigment, to render a sensation of the scene such as the movement of wind through trees and clouds. The great innovation of the Impressionists was to elevate such quickly painted pictures to the status of the finished work of art, suitable for sale and exhibition.