Today, the description of a sculpture as ‘impressionistic’ is both widely used and universally accepted but it took some years after the term was comfortably used in regard to painting for this to be the case. Why was this? There are of course a number of key reasons, not least that at the time of the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 it was a major shift away from the hitherto indoctrinations of the Salon schools. Painting had remained on a largely similar approach for the previous 300 years and we were not yet used to a new school or movement every few years – the shift to Impressionism was to pave the way for our ability to process further change more readily.
