impressionist painters

so i was wondering if anyone could answer this question....
what non-european art form served as a model for many of the impressionist painters?

thanks in advance for the info.

Hmmm...form what I can deduce Photography?

he rise of the impressionist movement can be seen in part as a reaction by artists to the newly established medium of photography. The taking of fixed or still images challenged painters by providing a new medium with which to capture reality. Initially photography?s presence seemed to undermine the artist?s depiction of nature and their ability to mirror reality. Both portrait and landscape paintings were deemed somewhat deficient and lacking in truth as photography ?produced lifelike images much more efficiently and reliably?. [13]

"In spite of this, photography actually inspired artists to pursue other means of artistic expression, and rather than competing with photography to emulate reality, artists focused ?on the one thing they could inevitably do better than the photograph ? by further developing into an art form its very subjectivity in the conception of the image, the very subjectivity that photography eliminated?. ?the Impressionists were the first to consciously offer a subjective alternative to the photograph?."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism#Timeline

And of course the inventors of the first camera/pin hole camera were not European but one can argue that the European's made Photography popular.

thanks for the info. i was able to find what i was looking for.