a theory and school of painting exemplified chiefly by Monet, Pissarro, and Sisley, but also by Manet, Renoir, etc., whose chief aim is to capture a momentary glimpse of a subject, esp. to reproduce the changing effects of light by applying paint to canvas in short strokes of pure color: the term has been extended to literature, as the fiction of Stephen Crane and Virginia Woolf and imagist poetry, and to music, as by Debussy and Ravel, which seeks to render impressions and moods by various characteristic devices