Description
It is dangerous to lay down rigid criteria for defining so individualistic a group of artists and the Impressionist movement must rather be described in terms of very general attitudes and techniques from which numerous exceptions have to be noted. By and large the group was in opposition to the academic training of the schools, although Manet and Degas at least were well grounded in the principles of classical art derived from an extensive study of the older masters.
They were in revolt from the basic principles of Romanticism that the primary purpose of art is to communicate the emotional excitement of the artist and that the recording of nature is secondary. Against this they were generally in sympathy with the Realist attitude that the emotional condition of the artist is secondary and the primary purpose of art is to record fragments of nature or life in an objective and scientific spirit as impersonally as possible.
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