The Waiting is just one of the series of dance-dancer themes Degas is famous for. It has been suggested that he had been commissioned to do some paintings in a dance class. Clearly, he had been tagged as an Impressionist. Impressionism was a 19th century art movement associated with Paris-based artists. They started exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s and the name of the movement came from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant). The critic Louis Leroy coined the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.
Impressionist paintings are characterized by visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities that often accentuates the effects of the passage of time, ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles such as semi-top view of The Waiting.
Impressionists capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air, a painting technique with realistic scenes of modern life emphasizing vivid overall effects rather than details. In addition, short or broken brush strokes of pure and unmixed color, not smoothly blended was used to achieve the effect of intense color vibration.
Impressionism is also used to describe art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period. It’s beginnings were precedents during the Académie des Beaux-Arts dominating the French art scene in the middle of the 19th century. Considered the upholder of traditional standards in content and style, the Académie was the upholder of traditional standards for French painting. However, there is the preference for historical subjects, religious themes, and portraits while landscape and still life were not. The Académie preferred carefully finished images that mirror reality. Color was somber and conservative, and the traces of brush strokes were suppressed concealing the artist’s personality, emotions, and working techniques.
The Académie held the annual Salon de Paris, a juried art show. Artists whose work displayed in the show won prizes, garnered commissions, and enhanced their prestige.
However, young artists of that time have started to paint in a lighter and brighter manner than painters of the preceding generation, extending further the realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school. Interested in painting landscape and contemporary life than in recreating scenes from history, they submitted their art to the Salon, only to see the juries reject their best efforts in favor of trivial works by artists working in the approved style. A group of young realists, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, who had studied under Charles Gleyre, became friends and soon were joined by Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, and Armand Guillaumin.
Nudes were routinely accepted by the Salon when featured in historical and allegorical paintings so that when a Manet painting The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l’herbe) was rejected in 1863 because it depicted a nude woman with two clothed men at a picnic, together with other rejects set off a firestorm among French artists.
In 1863, Emperor Napoleon III decreed that the public be allowed to judge the work themselves, and the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was organized and eventually drew attention to the existence of a new tendency in art. It attracted more visitors than the regular Salon. Petitions requesting a new Salon des Refusés in 1867, and again in 1872, were denied so that in April of 1874, a group consisting of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas organized their own exhibition at the studio of the photographer Nadar.
While artists have long painted outdoors, working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism by mid 1800s. En plein air became more popular with the introduction in the 1870s of paints in tubes. Prior to that, each painter made their own paints by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil.
The rise of Impressionism in France also coincided in the development of new techniques specific to the movement that encompass an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of color.
The public gradually appreciated that Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if it did not receive the approval of the art critics and establishment of that time.
It is characterized of recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than recreating the subject, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms. Impressionism became a purveyor of various movements in painting that followed, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism. Degas as an Impressionist showed complex articulation of forms and textures, depicting light and reflection, and an overall mastery of his handling of paint.
Degas works has been compared to Johannes Vermeer’s (or Jan Vermeer), a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of ordinary bourgeois life considered a moderately successful provincial painter in his lifetime.