The artists of this movement each used their own draftsmanship, and there were differences between them, not least because Impressionism had neither a manifesto nor a theoretical background and was neither a school nor a homogenous movement. One characteristic that characterises all Impressionists is “the desire to reproduce the everyday”. These painters arrived at Impressionist painting, but they did not stop there: they tried to evolve their painting to the point where it was contradictory to its origins.
Technical revolutions in colour and light
The great specificity of the Impressionist pictorial language lies in the use of colour and light. Colour and light are the main elements of vision: the human eye initially perceives light and colours, then distinguishes shapes and the space in which they are located.
In order to minimise the loss of reflected light, so as to give their canvases the same visual intensity as a direct perception of reality, the Impressionists adopted the following techniques:

• they only use pure colours;
• they do not dilute the colours to achieve chiaroscuro, which is completely absent from their canvases;
• to enhance the luminous sensation, they combine complementary colours;
• they never use black;
• even the shadows are coloured.

There are two fundamental attitudes that differ among Impressionist painters:

1. on the one hand there are painters such as Monet, who propose pure visual sensations, without worrying about the shapes that produce these optical sensations, he makes the shapes evaporate, dissolving them in the light.
2. on the other hand, there are painters such as Cézanne and Degas, who use the Impressionist technique to propose the vision of forms inserted into a space. Cézanne reconstructs forms, but using only light and colour.
   Degas was an Impressionist but he did not want to be called that, he did not paint “en plein air”, he painted in the studio and used sketching, perspective, black and white.

Renoir was absolutely Impressionist, but from a certain point onwards he returned to mythological themes and even worked on sculptures.