150 years of the First Impressionist Exhibition, 1874-2024

150 years ago, on April 15, 1874, a group of artists called the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc. organized an exhibition in Paris that launched the movement called Impressionism.

Its founding members included Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, among others.

Thirty-one artists had gathered to hold their own art fair, outside the official Salon, in a declaration of independence that marked the birth of a groundbreaking art movement.

Claude Monet | Impression, Sunrise, 1872 | Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet

Joan Llimona | Romantic painter

Joan Llimona i Bruguera (1860-1926) was a Spanish artist who rose to popularity at end of the Romantic movement in Europe.

Llimona was a key contributor to the modernist movement.

Despite his brief life, Llimona made a lasting impact on the modernist movement in European art during the early 20th century.

Marcel Rieder | Academic painter

Marcel Rieder (1862-1942) was a French painter.

He was born in Thann. Rieder came from a distinguished family in Alsace; his grandfather Jean Jacques Rieder (1778-1852) was a minister of the Temple Neuf Protestant church in Strasbourg.

Marcel Rieder studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

He became a member of the Société des Artistes Français in 1894, and exhibited almost every year until 1939 in the Salon de Paris.

Marco Ricci | Baroque painter

Marco Ricci (1676-1730) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Early years

He was born at Belluno and received his first instruction in art from his uncle, Sebastiano Ricci, likely in Milan in 1694-6.

He left for Venice with his uncle in 1696, but had to flee the city.

He visited Rome, where he was for some time occupied in painting perspective views.

John Keats | Ode on a Grecian Urn / Ode su un'Urna Greca, 1819

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

Alfred Elmore | A Greek Ode | Christie's

Carla Accardi | Abstract painter

From 6 March to 9 June 2024, Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome dedicates an important retrospective to Carla Accardi on the anniversary of her birth, 1924-2024.

A figure of undisputed prominence on the international panorama, Carla Accardi (Trapani, 1924 - Rome, 2014) was a major player in the visual culture both of Italy and abroad.

Whilst maintaining a singular and exceptional expressive coherence in her work, Accardi contributed to the emergence and development of new ways of understanding the artwork, from the Abstraction of the immediate post-War years to Informal, Conceptual painting, Environment Painting, to art influenced by feminism, the rediscovered joie de vivre embodied in the painting of the 1980s, right up to the grandiose synthesis of her work in the 1990s and 2000s.

John Woodrow Kelley, 1952

A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, John Woodrow Kelley is a representational artist known for mythological scenes and portraiture.

In his works, Kelley seeks to reinterpret Western art through a contemporary lens.

His lifelong fascination with classical art stemmed from a trip to the Greek Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, at age six.

Kelley’s oil paintings are inspired by Greek mythology and studies of the old masters like Diego Velázquez and Caravaggio; this emphasis on the subject matter and vocabulary of classical realism is in reaction to the emptiness of abstract expressionism and modernism in the visual arts.

Amalie Lindegren | Genre painter

Amalia Euphrosyne Lindegren (1814-1891) was a Swedish painter.

She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (1856).

Lindegren is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.

She painted portraits and genre and was inspired by Adolph Tidemand, Hans Gude and Per Nordenberg and the contemporary German style.