Philosophically, Impressionists sought even more relevance in subject matter, turning to everyday life for artistic motivation.  They aspired for art that reflected the people as they were, and that necessitated acceptance of the urban setting and rejection of the Realists’ ideal of peasant life as simply another artistic convention not reflective of contemporary life.  Reluctant to pose a composition, Impressionists explored the "fleeting moment" or the "temporal fragment" in ordinary life.  Where the Realists yearned for a contemporary view of history, the Impressionists sought an instantaneous view.

Impressionism made its debut in Paris in 1874.  The new style of painting was greeted with much criticism and derision.  In all, the small group of painters, including Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1841-1919), Edgar Degas (1832-1917), Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), Georges Seurat and Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), among others, exhibited together only eight times.  Strong disagreements over theory and practice led to the eventual break-up.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), an American painter living in France, was accepted as a member of the group in 1879, and participated in later exhibitions.  Another American, Theodore Robinson (1852-1896), lived a great part of his short life in France and was a friend of Claude Monet.  Although he did not exhibit with the Impressionists, he nevertheless was one of the first American artists to return to the United States espousing Impressionism.

The first exhibition of French Impressionist paintings in America was held in Boston in 1883.  The display consisted of works by several artists, including Monet, Pissarro and Sisley.  In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago had a significant art section devoted to American Impressionist painters, and in 1898, the Ten American Painters was formed in New York.  "The Ten" was a group of professional Impressionist artists who organized for the purpose of exhibition and sale of their paintings.  They were Frank W. Benson (1862-1951), Joseph De Camp (1858-1923), Thomas W. Dewing (1851-1938), Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Willard L. Metcalf (1853-1925), Robert Reid (1862-1929), E. E. Simmons (1852-1931), Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938), John H. Twachtman (1853-1902), J. Alden Weir (1852-1919) and William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), who was invited to join after the death of Twachtman.

Just as the original group of French Impressionists consisted of diverse personalities with disparate aims and philosophical approaches, American Impressionists likewise were practicing different forms of the style, and on occasion straining the limits of what can be loosely defined as Impressionism.  Moreover, Impressionism came to America at least a decade after its riotous debut in France.  As such, American painters benefited from the soothing effects of time on a critical art public.  Also, they had the luxury of picking and choosing between a number of techniques and approaches, many of which were developed by artists who had progressed beyond Impressionism.  These methods, principally Post-Impressionism, concerned themselves with specific uses of subject, color and line, and related to painting techniques followed by artists such as Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890).

By 1900, Impressionism, or what may be more properly termed "Impressionistic Realism", was the style of choice among American painters.  The significant contributions of French Impressionism to American art were in the use of color and the specialized brushwork.  Americans, in general, did not dissolve forms, a common practice with Claude Monet and his followers.  The penchant for realistic observation of scenes, long a staple of American painting, survived the Impressionist onslaught.  The scientific theories of color, as revealed by Chevreul, were indeed well received by Americans, even by those who did not consider themselves Impressionists, and the outcome showed in paintings with brilliant and convincing effect of natural light.  The loose, choppy brush stroke that characterizes an Impressionist work was both the consequence of the quick manner of paint application and the desire to produce a brilliant surface covered with a multitude of small daubs of bright color.

As a regional variant of American Impressionism, the California Plein-Air style is a composite of traditional American landscape painting and influences from French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.  It is part of the continuum of American art's passion with landscape, a lineage that began long before the early years of the American Republic.