On its 150th anniversary, Impressionism is surprisingly relevant

THE WORLD was not always an arena of Claude Monet superfans. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” sneered Louis Leroy, an art critic, when describing Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise”. The painting of a hazy port in Normandy was hung in a show put on by the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers Etc that opened on April 15th 1874. Some of the comments about the sketchy style adopted by Monet and some of his fellow “rebels” were so acerbic that they sound more like put-downs from social-media trolls than professional art commentary. An “appalling spectacle of human vanity losing its way to the point of dementia” was how another critic in the 1870s described the new style.