The painting is neither melancholic nor frightened. It is hazy and light, meant to give the impression of a new day and a new era, especially for a France that was recovering and industrializing after their defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. 

The impressionist work was not commissioned, and likely would have put off Parisians used to seeing the works at the Salon de Paris. It was highly criticized at the time of its completion, and only appealed to other Impressionists.

Paul Gauguin is the only one listed who is not an Impressionist, whose work post-dated Monet's Sunrise. He is a post-impressionist who deviated purposefully from the work of his predecessors.

Monet was not popular until much later in his career, and painted as a statement of rebellion instead of as an attempt to gain popularity. 

Impressionism as a movement began in Paris, France, and it was initially rejected by the Salon there. Impressionists were trained artists and they often worked outdoors as they tried to capture natural changing light.

The Saint-Lazare Station, Claude Monet's painting depicted here, shows trains pulling into a major train station in Paris. Fitting with his prominent role in the Impressionist movement, Claude Monet often chose to paint every day scenes like agricultural fields and cityscapes. This stood in stark contrast to previous generations of artists who preferred historical, mythical, or religious subjects when including human figures and large-scale landscapes when painting outdoor scenes.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Claude_Monet_004.jpg

Although romantic in sweep and not fully representational in form, JMW Turner's painting portrays a ship throwing over a number of dead bodies to lose weight during a storm. Titled The Slave Ship, the painting was a deliberate political statement by Turner, who was an ardent abolitionist, an opponent of slavery. Although painted after the British Empire had banned slave trading, Turner hoped that displaying the work in front of Prince Albert, Consort to Queen Victoria, would make the Royal Couple promote abolitionism worldwide when it was first exhibited in 1840.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slave-ship.jpg

The Coiffure by Mary Cassatt shows a woman fixing her hair in front of a mirror, an everyday scene which is captured by the artist in a candid moment. This subject is highly similar to the conventions of "genre painting," which is a European tradition of depicting small moments from everyday life that originated in the sixteenth century. "Genre painting" was seen as the lowest subject matter for art until the Impressionists upended the hierarchy of subjects in the late nineteenth century, a fact hugely influential on Mary Cassatt.

Image is in the public domain, accessed through Wikipedia Media Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_Cassatt_-_The_Coiffure_-_NGC_29882.jpg

Cezanne's series of portraits of his wife, brought together in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit called "Madame Cezanne," ranged in medium from watercolor to graphite to oil. Several of the portraits feature Madame Cezanne in red or blue dresses, sitting in an armchair.

Cassatt and Degas were close friends who shared sensibilities, techniques, and subjects (Cassatt did a series of paintings depicting the world of theatre). Though Matisse painted the well-known "Dance," neither he nor the others are associated with ballet the way Degas is.