The Impressionist painters of the 1870s broke with a studio tradition that had governed European art for centuries. Rather than composing scenes indoors from sketches and memory, they carried their easels outdoors to paint directly before the subject, a practice made possible by the recent invention of paint sold in portable metal tubes. Working quickly to capture shifting daylight, they applied short, broken strokes of unblended color that, seen from a distance, fuse into shimmering surfaces. Critics at first mocked the results as unfinished, complaining that the pictures looked like hasty impressions rather than proper paintings. Yet that very immediacy was the point: the painters wanted to record the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere as the eye actually perceives them, before the mind tidies the scene into fixed objects. What early viewers dismissed as a defect later generations recognized as the movement's central achievement.