The Impressionists

"The subjects of Impressionist painting were in their time model occasions of freedom. They released spectators for a moment from constricting habit, routine, and domestic order, and revitalized them through the stimulus of the novel beauties of the visual. This art celebrates the mobility of urban strollers, travelers, and sportsmen; the receptivity of eager, alert spectators; and the richness and indeterminate aspect of the surroundings; open, changing, and offering a multitude of captivating views and sensations.... The scenes, both outdoor and indoor, were, in feeling, the contrary of the regulated in practical life; they were congenial to an outlook that anticipated the moment of aesthetic seeing as an end in itself, to be savored without thought of cause or consequence. In Impressionist pictures, the agreeable aesthetic occasions of life in the common environment, with their connotations of pleasure and freedom, have become the chief subjects of art. Their subjects consist not only of nature encountered in the open countryside as in earlier landscape painting, where it is often a secure and agreeable solitude, but also of what was most public and modern: the streets, parks, resorts, railroads, cafes, amusements, outdoor sports, and other attractions of the holiday world"—Meyer Schapiro.