Genre paintings best reflect the aesthetic principles of impressionism, and the fact that you chose the genre means that you truly feel this style. Impressionism is distinctive for its artistic message of grasping the fleeting moments, the whirlpool of life. Everyday routine became the essential subject of these paintings.

The everyday life has the new interpretation here, different from the hint of burden the concept generally wears. Genre paintings in realism tend to portray typical characters and scenes revealing the most characteristic features of the type – a profession, social status, nationality etc. In romanticism genre paintings capture the subjects that help to convey the conflict, it being the fight between a man and the world, individuality and the routine, the past and the future, anything that is capable of contradiction. In impressionism, on the other hand, a person is viewed as a bundle of fleeting emotions, so the everyday scenes provide no other meaning than the first impression. Anything deeper is ruled out. These paintings are pictures of people in motion, there are no posing figures, the silhouettes are diffused, glares and flickers of sunlight play in the hair, on the drapes and the wheels and the trees, reminding you of the impression you get after you cast a glance at something but before you stop and stare.

It was the impressionists who first took their job into the street – they left the studios, went ourdoors and painted urban streets with such a flare that it became a trend. And that is how light and air became the prominent characters of their paintings. Everyday scenes of impressionists are terrificly realistic due to the “occasional”, asymmetric and off-the cuff character of composition. Artists often turned to the unusual perspective – “bird’s eye” or “frog’s eye”, that included the viewer making him part of the play. People dance, chat and look at you – but they never pose. And there is light, of course, the vast glimmering mass of light reverberating on glasses, hair, leafage, windows, curtains – wherever you look …