Compared to other shapes in the work the sun stands out as a regular geometric circle rising from the early morning fog. The capture of a moment in time is provided by implied color shifts, textural elements and elements in the composition. Every brush stroke has the purpose of creating the mood of the piece and providing just enough definition to keep the work from abstraction. The ships and trees in the background are sketched in as foggy, blue shapes which blend into each other and yet are identifiable.
The texture is especially apparent in the vertical line of the reflection of the rising sun on the water. The oil pigments are applied in a painterly manner with very visible brush strokes which are sometimes employed in daubs of considerable thickness to add a textural quality impossible with photography. The browns of the clouds in the sunrise could be achieved by mixing blue and orange. The entire painting looks as though it has been painted using only five tubes of oil color: blue, orange, white, black and perhaps a little yellow. Blues and oranges dominate with the tones and shades of the blue used throughout and the orange sun and color in the water and sky used as a contrasting accent. That said, the palette of colors for Impression: Sunrise is actually quite restrained. Monet was quite right in choosing a style that emphasized the spontaneous hues and textures of differing moods and sense of movement through time and space that the photographs of the time could not portray. If paintings and photographs had to compete as art forms for the attention of the public in the 19 th century the technologically inclined might prefer photography but paintings had one great advantage in the opinions most people- they had color. A photograph using techniques available at the time could contain a great deal of realistic detail but the necessarily long exposure times gave many shots a contrived look since any movement would show up as an indistinct blur. Painters of this era were greatly influenced by photography especially when it came to cropping and composition.
visible brushwork and the lack of detail because it seemed to them as if the artist was making a rough oil paint sketch in the field to take back to the studio to finish later. Critics of the time thought that the style had an unfinished, unpolished look and especially derided the uneven thickness of paint application. Landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes had been popular long before the Impressionist style arose but the invention of collapsible metal tubes containing premixed oil paints gave artists a way to take their materials with them and set up a small portable easel in any location. This spontaneity and sense of immediacy is a hallmark of Impressionist painting. He was not interested in fine detail because he wanted his painting to contain a slice of time in a particular location and recreate the colors and mood of a moment that could never happen again. Monet’s aim was to create a style that involved using color to represent what he saw. The work from which Impressionism got its name seems an appropriate place to start with in a formal analysis of this painting from 1872 by Claude Monet.