what influenced the impressionist movement
1 Impressionist compositions were strongly influenced by the development of photography and the discovery of Japanese woodcuts. 2  Impressionism is now seen as the first movement in modern art, and had a huge influence on the development of art in the 20th century. Impressionism was a style of painting that used a more scientific analysis of colour to capture the effects of light in nature. 2  The main artists associated with Impressionism were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley and Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec.