The year 2024 was the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. Today, exhibitions of French Impressionist paintings are guaranteed blockbusters. But why are these artists and their works important and how were they received 150 years ago? You’ll love the beautiful canvases by Monet, Degas, Pissarro, and others even more when you understand what they tell us about a rapidly changing world, shifting societal mores, and new technologies.

Instructor: Cate O’Hara fell in love with Impressionism as a sixth-grader on a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been director of the OLLI at the University of Cincinnati since 2013 and occasionally leads a poetry writing workshop or gives a talk on art history. Previously, she worked for 25 years at Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art in a variety of roles, including publications management and editing, public relations and marketing, and public education. She holds undergraduate degrees from Illinois State University and an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.