35th Annual Atha Lecture | The Impressionists' Passion for Fashion

Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture, and the David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, explores why and how painters in the late 19th century, including Pierre-August Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet, embraced fashion trends as they sought to capture modern life on canvas. In a time of rapid change in how people of all classes dressed, the avant-garde Impressionists and their followers were among the first to “fashion” their models for wider artistic goals.