What is Impressionism and is Joseph Conrad an impressionist? Give textual evidence from Heart of Darkness.

Impressionism was originally an artistic rather than a
literary movement. It was based on the nature of perception, specifically the knowledge
that we do not actually see objects, but rather see light falling on objects that is
reflected to our eyes. Thus impressionists focused on portraying the light that
impresses itself on our eyes rather than reconstructing the object per
se. The symbolist poets sometimes were described as impressionists because,
in opposition to the realist movement, they believed that we do not experience external
events directly but instead as mediated through our senses and sensibilities. Thus poets
such as Rimbaud were concerned with the nature of sensation, of trying to describe
emotional impressions, rather than to create vivid approximations of an external
world. 

Perhaps the most prototypically impressionist
novelist, in the strict sense of the term, was Huysman, whose A
Rebours focuses on an aesthete concerned with this specific problem of
maximizing certain types of sensation in his life. While certain recent genre theorists
have discussed Heart of Darkness as an impressionistic novel,
stylistically it is far closer to German Expressionist work than to the refined urban
sensibilities of the French fin de siecle poets and their imitators
(such as Arthur Symons, whose poetry and criticism were seminal in the use of
"impressionism" as a literary term). In some ways, Heart of
Darkness has almost Gothic characteristics in its exotic locale and
atmosphere of horror. Simply expressing the interior thoughts of characters does not
make a writer an impressionist, as that is a feature common to almost all
novelists. 

Ian Watts's position that Conrad was an
impressionistic writer uses the term somewhat ahistorically, not referencing
Impressionism within its literary or artistic context, but rather referring to Hume's
philosophical concept of impressions and labeling works focused on the interior states
of characters, such as those of Conrad and Virginia Wolfe, as impressionistic, as
opposed to realistic novels that focused on the external world.