A lasting impression Paris revisits 150 years of painting that let fresh air into art world

To look at Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise is to live in its moment. You are right there in Le Havre docks at t sunrise, in the T purple misty light, as cranes and ships vaguely materialise in the weak light of the sun's low red disc.

- Jonathan Jones

You could also note what it does not have. It does not have firm borders or precise forms: the people in boats are just blue dabs, as are the boats. The sunlight and ship masts mirrored in the water are spattered, incoherent. By the standards to which European artists had cleaved for the previous four centuries, Impression, Sunrise isn't a finished work of art at all but an oil sketch. 

"An impression indeed!" the critic Louis Leroy sneered when it was unveiled along with works by Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and more in an 1874 Paris show. Another critic dismissed the works as "paint scrapings from a palette spread evenly over a dirty canvas". But it was Leroy's review that bit, with his parting shot that the entire show was "the exhibition of impressionists".

The name stuck: 150 years on, the first impressionist exhibition is being commemorated in France with the enthusiasm the British reserve for a royal wedding. The Musée d'Orsay's major exhibition 1874: Inventing Impressionism opens on 26 March, with other shows around France.

Yet it doesn't seem like a century and a half. Impressionist paintings look like today's city streets, cafes and stations, give or take a top hat.

In the years immediately before that Paris exhibition, some of the pioneering impressionists came to Britain to escape the Franco