Do Donna and I like seeing Impressionist art? Did painter Edgar Degas have a thing for ballerinas? Yes and yes. So when we heard that the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. would be the only U.S. stop for an international touring show featuring the works from the first exhibition of Impressionism, in 1874, we made sure to see it. We went the Monday after Thanksgiving, when there were no throngs of student-field-trippers, and made a pre-holiday lunch-and-a-show date of it. The term Impressionism was coined by art critic Louis Leroy during that first show, which was sort of a protest by artists whose non-conformist works had been rejected by the Salon de Paris, the annual show organized by the powerful and conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts. Leroy used the term derisively in response to a painting by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise . The painting shows a busy seaport, looking across the water to the docks. The boats and their masts are hard to discern through t...