When the sun rises, it marks every day a new beginning…

and to this lukewarm sunrise over the port of Le Havre, in the English Channel on the Normandy coast, the actual birth of the impressionist movement is due.

☞ Do you know…

‣ The painting is in fact titled “Impression, Sunrise” and does not aim to reproduce reality: the author Claude Monet doesn’t want to capture what he sees but rather the sensations that the landscape arouse in an attempt to transmit them to the viewer. Therefore no element is exalted or outlined with particular detail, if not the sun – here further lit by our red – which propagates its own heat by confusing and mixing the cold tones on the canvas.

‣ The work is as innovative in the use of color as in the drafting technique. The brush strokes are no longer linear, smooth and precise as per academic tradition, but fast, full-bodied and dotted to express the immediacy of the experience lived by the painter at that precise moment.

⇒ Date: 1872

⇒ Material: Oil on canvas

⇒ Dimensions: 48 x 63 cm

⇒ Site: Musée Marmottan Monet, Parigi