What critic coined the term 'Impressionism' after seeing Monet's painting?

Louis Leroy coined the term “Impressionism” after seeing Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise.

Leroy was an art critic and journalist for the satirical Paris newspaper Le Charivari. He reviewed the first independent exhibition of the Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, held in Paris in April and May 1874. The exhibition challenged the official Salon system and displayed works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Sisley, and others.

Leroy’s review, published on 25 April 1874, was titled “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” He used Monet’s 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise as the basis for a mocking pun, suggesting that the artists offered only rough impressions rather than finished works. The insult quickly became a label the artists and public adopted.

The term therefore did not originate as a formal theory proposed by the painters themselves. Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Émile Zola all wrote important criticism, but none is the canonical answer to this particular naming story. Monet supplied the painting’s title; Leroy supplied the movement’s famous name.