Editing Artistic revolution (section)

== Scientific and technological ==
Not all artistic revolutions were political. Sometimes, science and technological innovations have brought about unforeseen transformations in the works of artists.  The stylistic revolution known as [[Impressionism]],  by painters eager to more accurately capture the changing colors of light and shadow, is inseparable from discoveries and inventions in the mid-19th century in which the style was born.

[[Eugene Chevreul|Michel Eugène Chevreul]], a French chemist hired as director of dyes at a French tapestry works,  began to investigate the optical nature of color in order to improve color in fabrics.  Chevreul realized It was the eye, and not the dye, that had the greatest influence on color, and from this, he revolutionized [[color theory]] by grasping what came to be called the law of simultaneous [[Contrast (vision)|contrast]]: that colors mutually influence one another when juxtaposed, each imposing its own [[Complementary colors|complementary color]] on the other.  The French painter [[Eugène Delacroix]], who had been experimenting with what he called broken tones, embraced Chevreul's book, ''The Law of Contrast of Color'' (1839) with its explanations of how juxtaposed colors can enhance or diminish each other, and his exploration of all the visible colors of the spectrum.  Inspired by Chevreul's 1839 treatise, Delacroix passed his enthusiasm on to the young artists who were inspired by him. It was Chevreul who led the Impressionists to grasp that they should apply separate brushstrokes of pure color to a canvas and allow the viewer's eye to combine them optically.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.britannica.com/biography/Michel-Eugene-Chevreul| title = Michel-Eugène Chevreul {{!}} French chemist {{!}} Britannica}}</ref>

They were aided greatly in this by innovations in oil paint itself. Since [[Renaissance|the Renaissance]],  painters had to grind [[pigment]], add oil and thus create their own [[paint]]s; these time-consuming paints also quickly dried out, making studio painting a necessity for large works, and limiting painters to mix one or two colors at a time and fill in an entire area using just that one color before it dried out.  In 1841, a little-known American painter named [[John G. Rand]] invented a simple improvement without which the Impressionist movement could not have occurred: the small, flexible tin tube with removable cap in which [[oil paint]]s could be stored.<ref>http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/never-underestimate-the-power-of-a-paint-tube-36637764/?no-ist, May 2013, by Perry Hurt</ref> Oil paints kept in such tubes stayed moist, usable, and portable. For the first time since the Renaissance, painters were not trapped by the time frame of how quickly oil paint dried.

Paints in tubes could be easily loaded up and carried out into the real world,  to directly observe the play of color and natural light, in shadow and movement, to paint in the moment.  Selling the oil paint in tubes also brought about the arrival of dazzling new pigments -  [[chrome yellow]], cadmium blue - invented by 19th century industrial chemists. The tubes freed the Impressionists to paint quickly, and across an entire canvas, rather than carefully delineated single-color sections at a time; in short, to sketch directly in oil - racing across the canvas in every color that came to hand and thus inspiring their name of "impressionists" - since such speedy, bold brushwork and dabs of separate colors made contemporary critics think their paintings were mere impressions, not finished paintings, which were to have no visible brush marks at all, seamless under layers of varnish.

[[Pierre-Auguste Renoir]] said, “Without colors in tubes, there would be no [[Paul Cézanne|Cézanne]], no [[Claude Monet|Monet]], no [[Camille Pissarro|Pissarro]], and no Impressionism.”<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/never-underestimate-the-power-of-a-paint-tube-36637764/#P4ovFKfbRLyMIhQT.99| title = Never Underestimate the Power of a Paint Tube {{!}} Arts & Culture {{!}} Smithsonian Magazine}}</ref>

Finally, the careful, hyper-realistic techniques of [[Neoclassicism in France|French neo-classicism]] were seen{{By whom|date=November 2022}} as stiff and lifeless when compared to the remarkable new vision of the world as seen through the new invention of photography by the mid-1850s.  It was not merely that the increasing ability of this new invention, particularly by the French inventor [[Louis Daguerre|Daguerre]], made the realism of the painted image redundant as he deliberately competed in the Paris diorama with large-scale historical paintings.<ref>"Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre" by Stephen C. Pinson, Chicago, (2012) p. 1-12</ref>  The neo-classical subject matter, limited by Academic tradition to Greek and Roman legends, historical battles and Biblical stories, seemed oppressively clichéd and limited to artists eager to explore the actual world in front of their own eyes revealed by the camera - daily life, candid groupings of everyday people doing simple things, Paris itself, rural landscapes and most particularly the play of captured light - not the imaginary lionizing of unseen past events.<ref>Review of "The Lens of Impressionism," at University of Michigan Museum of Art, October- Dec. 2009 by Simon Kelly, Volume 9, Issue 1 Spring 2010, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring10/the-lens-of-impressionism</ref> Early photographs influenced Impressionist style by its use of asymmetry, cropping and most obviously the blurring of motion, as inadvertently captured in the very slow speeds of early photography.

[[Edgar Degas]], Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir - in their [[Framing (visual arts)|framing]], use of color, light and shadow, subject matter - put these innovations to work to create a new language of visual beauty and meaning.