Impressionism

Landscape painters move outdoors As the technical difficulties in chiaroscuro painting increased, and dark brown transparent shadows became harder to depict with assured permanency, this form of traditional studio setup gave way to newer environments. The rise of landscape painting was a key factor in this change, for as artists became more committed to an accurate depiction of outdoor sites and lighting, the studio gradually moved outdoors too. At first, in spite of the brilliant sunlight and reflected ambient atmospheric light found out-doors, artists, as it were, took their studio light out with them - they still saw their outdoor environment in terms of chiaroscuro and the browns of studio shadows. To some extent this vision was determined by the types of site and lighting preferred in the first half of the century. Dramatic storms, dawns, sunsets, forest or craggy scenes all tend to create strong contrasts of light and shadow, which could be translated in a broadly chiaroscuro technique. In any case, many such works, although based on outdoor studies, or even begun outdoors, were normally completed under darker studio conditions.
However, the example of outdoor studies by Corot. with their gold or pale lighting and ! luminous shadows, provided an important alternative to younger independent painters in the 1860s. Increasingly, artists began to complete their paintings out of doors in order to retain the unity of natural light effects and the I impact of the first impression. This renewed determination to capture the quality of light observed in site brought a freeing of artistic vision,  which  stimulated  painters to study brighter, lighter scenery in full daylight.
One of the major problems with studio-executed landscape paintings, especially those including figures, had always been the creation of a convincingly unified lighting. In such paintings, the background lighting was usually quite distinct from that on the figures, which were executed from models under the strictly controlled abrupt lights and darks of the studio.
On figures under natural outdoor light, the gradations from light to shade are softer and the shadows more diffused and attenuated, filled with reflected light from the sky. Even in works like Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, in which a high academic studio lighting was abandoned, the stark tonal contrasts of interior light are still in evidence. Manet adopted a dramatic frontal light, falling directly onto his figures, which obliterates halftones and reduces shadow to little more than striking black con-tours. This flattening, full-face light familiar to the artists from contemporary photography, produces broad blocks of light and dark when used indoors. During the 1870s the same full-face light was to be exploited by the Impressionists outdoors, where, by contrast, it suppresses tonal contrasts because shadows fall behind the objects depicted.