Through my exploration of Claude Monet's "Charing Cross Bridge," I learned that although my perception of the painting was shaped by my prior knowledge of the Impressionist movement, our concluding interpretations of art can never be absolute. The painter of my piece, Monet, was the known as the founder of the Impressionist Movement in art. Artists of this movement began to question how they as individuals perceived the world around them and how their unique experiences were different from everyone else's. They thought that the "visible [world] no longer presented .
itself to man in order to be seen." .
Typically painting landscapes or individuals engaged in everyday activity, impressionists sought to capture the moment of their visual experience as they saw it: to them, "the visible, in continual flux, became fugitive." As a result, the Impressionist art began to incorporate new aesthetic approaches to painting, using broken brush strokes, and emphasizing on aspects such as lighting, angle, and open composition. .
Although my research on the Impressionism art movement came after my observation of Monet's paintings, I was familiar with the Impressionist music era beforehand. Composers of the so-called Impressionist era began to incorporate new techniques of sound, eliciting an atmosphere or suggestion rather than telling a story. With my own experience with Impressionist music, I realized that the way of playing a composition was more open to interpretation than music of previous eras. .
While music of the classical and romantic era was more structured, having stricter rhythmic meters and sound arrangements, impressionist music was more open to interpretation, as the musician himself explored how to best produce the music of the piece. For example, whenever I played a composition by Debussy, who was known as the father of the Impressionist music era, I was never able to play it one way, even after I learned the entire piece.