Impression , Sunrise, like many other paintings in the first exhibition, was hotly discussed by the critics and, probably, by the public.  It is perhaps  difficult to appreciate this now, since Impressionist painting  has become  familiar  through a vast number of reproductions. But it is not just  the familiarity  of reproduction which has tamed Impressionism; it is also the kind of interpretation it has received. Broadly  speaking,  this has taken two forms until comparatively recently. According to the first - the Formalist and Modernist  view - Impressionism's interest lies largely in its "flatness," or the way it draws attention to its own "surface," or its nature as "paint" laid upon a support, as if  this  were  somehow expressive in itself and  in some  way that, say, the paint on a wall is not. According  to the other kind of interpretation - the biographical - Impressionism  is interesting because of the Impressionists' determination  to pursue  a  new style in the face of opposition from the reactionary institutions of art and the conservative  press and public. On this view, Monet's  painting  is interesting  because it attests to the courage of the artist,  his "genius,"  and  the triumph of progress  over stagnation.

These approaches have many shortcomings. Modernism has very little to say about just what it is  that makes paint expressive.  Biographically  based accounts of Impressionism tend to emphasise  the personality  behind  the picture at the expense of the picture itself. Moreover,  both  approaches also tend to obscure the relationship  between  a painting  and its wider history simply by writing  this issue out of consideration. In particular, the idea that art owes its virtue to the heroic individual who  made it eliminates  from  Impressionism any account of its  determination in the wider world , and  any account of its political meanings.

Edouard Manet, Fifer (1866)

Edouard Manet, The Balcony (1868-69)

Because of these shortcomings,  art historians have looked for other approaches with considerable vigour in recent years. These new perspectives on Impressionism - or revisionist histories - are roughly of four overlapping  kinds: social-historical, feminist, psychoanalytical, and  what I   shall tentatively   call anthropological.

Social-historical interpretations  mostly  fall into two varieties, anecdotal and  theoretical, sometimes crudely labelled "Marxist". By and large, the anecdotal, social history of art is interested in analysing the contents of works of art in terms of what went on in the everyday  social life they represent. Sometimes it  tries to find significance in a painting as though its contents  symbolised some value or belief. Thus,  Impression, Sunrise might  be seen as an interesting  painting  because of what it tells us about  the social life in the docks at Le Havre, or because its imagery of the day breaking over the thriving port could be seen as a symbol of the regeneration of France after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

In the main,  theoretical social histories of Impressionism try to estimate the extent  to which Impressionist paintings issued from, served, or resisted dominant  ideology - the middle-class, white,  and  masculine  beliefs that  posed or  were  accepted  as truth at the time (see Chapters Two and Three).  Using this sort of thinking,  we might want to ask  of Impression ,  Sunrise whether  or not it  challenged conservative and authoritarian conceptions  of artistic  merit, such  as  the Academic doctrine which  held that a painting's value lay in its ability  to aspire to timeless (classical) beauty and  the unique moral order that  this supposedly exemplified.  In Academic theory, beauty was nearly always connected with morality, some theorists claiming that this  was  because beauty  was Divine in  origin, which  might seem a very strange claim when confronted  with an Academic painting  such asWilliam Adolphe  Bouguereau's   Nymphs a11d Satyr (1873) or Cabanel's  Venus. Equally, we might want to ask whether or not Monet's  painting expressed other  beliefs about  artistic  quality which  might  be tied  to  the ideologies being consolidated by the emergent bourgeoisie from which he came.  For instance,  we could ask  whether or not  it expressed sympathy with  the idea that  the individual could choose  his or her own  subject  matter  and standards  of  beauty and,  if so, whether this links the painting with ideologies of individualism held to be central to the identity of the bourgeoisie. . . .