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6. Édouard Manet, Self-Portrait with Palette, 1879.

Oil on canvas, 83 × 67 cm.

Private Collection.

7. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875.

Oil on canvas, 85 × 60.5 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

The future Impressionists believed they were making a clean break with academic painting when they left Gleyre’s studio. Eleven years later, they were developing a new concept of painting as they worked en plein-air (out-of-doors). The time had come to announce this concept, as well as their independence from official art, and to show their canvases in the context of their own exhibition. But organising such an event was not as easy as one might think.

Up until then, there was only one venue for exhibiting contemporary art in France: the Salon. Founded in the seventeenth century during the reign of Louis XIV by his prime minister Colbert, the exhibition was inaugurated in the Louvre’s Salon carré, whence its name. Beginning in 1747, the Salon was held biennially in different locations. By the time the future Impressionists appeared on the stage of art, the Salon boasted a two hundred year history. Obviously every painter wanted to exhibit in the Salon, because it was the only way to become known and consequently, to be able to sell paintings. But it was hard to get admitted. A critical jury made up of teachers from the École des beaux-arts selected the works for the exhibition. The Académie des Beaux-Arts (one of the five Academies of the Institut de France) picked the teachers for the jury from among its own members. Furthermore, the teachers in charge of selecting the Salon’s paintings and sculptures often chose work made by the same artists they had as students. It was not unusual to see jury members haggling amongst themselves for the right to have the work of their own students admitted.

The Salon’s precepts were extremely rigid and remained essentially unchanged throughout its entire existence. Traditional genres reigned and scenes taken from Greek mythology or the Bible were in accordance with the themes imposed on the Salon at its inception, only the individual scenes changed according to fashion. Portraiture retained its customary affected look and landscapes had to be “composed,” in other words, conceived from the artist’s imagination. Idealised nature, whether it concerned the female nude, portraiture, or landscape painting, was still a permanent condition of acceptance. The jury sought a high degree of professionalism in composition, drawing, anatomy, linear perspective, and pictorial technique. An irreproachably smooth surface, created with miniscule brushwork almost indiscernible to the eye, was the standard finish required for admission to the competition. There was no place in the Salon for the everyday reality young painters were anxious to explore. Finally, there was another, unformulated requirement: the paintings had to appeal to the potential buyers for whom they were made.

8. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Self-Portrait, c.1875.

Oil on canvas, 36.1 × 31.7 cm.

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.

The victorious revolution at the end of the eighteenth century had given rise to a nouveaux riches class. Former boutique owners who had profited from the revolution built luxurious townhouses in Paris, bought jewels from the most expensive stores on the rue de la Paix, and bought no less expensive paintings from celebrated Salon painters. The newly rich had questionable tastes that required some getting used to. It was precisely in the second half of the nineteenth century that the term “salon painter” became pejorative, implying a lack of principles and venality, the sort of eagerness toplease that was indispensable for commercial success. The very fact of admission to the Salon demonstrated extreme professionalism on the part of the painter and under these circumstances changing his manner of painting and his style was no great feat. It was not unusual to find a neo-classical composition next to a canvas painted in the spirit of romanticism by the same artist. It was nevertheless a matter of honour for the Salon to retain its prestige and consequently, to maintain the spirit of classicism upon which it had been based up until then.

Salon favourites were derisively called pompiers (firemen). The original meaning of this word has been lost over time. It may have stemmed from the constant presence of real firemen in the rooms of the Salon, or it may have been that the shiny headgear of the antique warriors in Salon paintings made one think of firemen. Or perhaps pompier was an echo of the French word for Pompei (Pompéi), as the Pompeian lifestyle was frequently depicted in the Salon’s antique compositions. One story attributes the origin of the term to the famous phrase by the academician Gérôme, who said that it was easier to be an arsonist than a fireman. By that the honourable professor meant artists like himself fulfilled the difficult and noble duty of firemen, whereas those who one way or another attacked the foundations of the Salon and the classical ideal of art, naturally seemed like arsonists. The four former pupils of Gleyre, along with Pissarro who had joined them, consciously took the side of the arsonists.

9. Camille Pissarro, Self-Portrait, 1903.

Oil on canvas, 41 × 33.3 cm.

Tate Gallery, London.

10. Édouard Manet, Portrait of Berthe Morisot with a Fan, 1874.

Oil on canvas, 61 × 50 cm.

Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille.

Academic stagnation was already inspiring protest among artists. Even the great Ingres, an Academy member and professor of painting for whom the defence of classicism was a matter of honour, was saying that the Salon was perverting and suffocating the artist’s sense of grandeur and beauty. Ingres saw that exhibiting in the Salon awakened an interest in financial gain, the desire to achieve recognition at any cost, and that the Salon itself was changing into a sales room by selling paintings in a market inundated with items for sale, instead of a place where art dominated commerce. Moreover, too many artists remained outside of the exhibit, either because of professional mediocrity or because they failed to meet the criteria of neo-classical painting. In 1855, only 2,000 out of 8,000 submissions were accepted for the Salon that coincided with the Universal Exposition. Gustave Courbet’s best work was rejected, including his famous Burial at Ornans. Jury members felt that his artistic leanings would have a fatal effect on French art. Indeed, Courbet was the first serious arsonist: “I have studied the art of the ancients and moderns outside of the system and without taking part in it,” he wrote in the catalogue to his individual exhibition. “I no more wanted to imitate the one than I wanted to copy the other…No! From a full awareness of tradition I simply wanted to draw the intelligent and independent feeling of my own individuality. To know how to, in order to be able to: such was my thinking. To be able to translate the values, ideas, and reality of my time, according to my own understanding; in short, to make a living art, that is my goal.” (Charles Léger, Courbet, Paris, 1925, p. 62). This statement by Courbet could have just as easily been made by the Impressionists, because, although using somewhat different means, all these artists aspired to the same goal.

Each of the future Impressionists tried, with mixed results, to get into the Salon. In 1864, Pissarro and Renoir were lucky enough to be admitted, although Renoir’s accepted painting, Esmeralda, was considered a critical failure for the artist, who destroyed it as soon as the Salon closed. In 1865, paintings by Pissarro, Renoir, and Monet were accepted.

In 1866, all the Impressionists – Monet, Bazille, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro – had their works accepted. Pissarro was singled out in a review of the Salon by the young literary figure Émile Zola. Zola wrote that nobody would talk about Pissarro because he was unknown and that nobody liked his painting because he strove for realism. It is possible that the future Impressionists sometimes got their paintings into the Salon simply because nobody knew who they were yet. The jury of 1867 was harsh towards the young painters: Bazille was rejected and among the many paintings submitted by Monet, only one was selected. Zola, who typically focused on young artists in his reviews (as if he had failed to notice the academic paintings), wrote to a friend that the jury, annoyed by his “Salon,” had closed its doors to all those seeking new artistic paths. The Salon of 1868 nevertheless showed works by all five future Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Bazille, Sisley and Pissarro. Even so, all of them felt an increasing desire to exhibit outside of the Salon.

11. Edgar Degas, After the Bath, c.1890–1893.

Pastel on tracing paper mounted on cardboard, 66 × 52.7 cm.

Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena.

The idea of having a separate exhibition probably came from Courbet’s example. He was the first to actually do it. In 1865 he hastily set up a shelter on the Champs-Élysées near the Universal Exposition with a sign that read “Pavilion of Realism,” sparking strong interest among the public. “People pay money to go to the theatre and concerts,” said Courbet, “don’t my paintings provide entertainment? I have never sought to live off the favour of governments…I only appeal to the public” (C. Léger, op. cit., p. 57). The future Impressionists wanted to attract attention, too. Even when they found their way into the Salon, their modest little landscapes were only noticed by their close friends. In April 1867, Frédéric Bazille wrote to his parents: “ We’ve decided to rent a large studio every year where we’ll exhibit as many of our works as we want. We’ll invite the painters we like to send paintings. Courbet, Corot, Diaz, Daubigny and many others…have promised to send us paintings and very much like our idea. With those painters, and Monet, who is the strongest of all, we’re sure to succeed. You’ll see, people are going to be talking about us.” (F. Daulte, op. cit., p. 58).

Organising an exhibition turned out to be no simple matter: it required money and contacts. One month later, Bazille wrote to his father: “I told you about the project of a few young men having an independent exhibit. After thoroughly exhausting our resources, we’ve succeeded in collecting a sum of two thousand five hundred francs, which is insufficient. We’re thus forced to give up on what we wanted to do. We must return to the bosom of officialdom, which never nourished us and which renounces us.” (F. Daulte, op. cit., p. 58). In the spring of 1867, Courbet and Édouard Manet each had their own solo exhibitions, after the Salon’s jury refused the paintings that they wanted to display there. Inspired by these examples, the future Impressionists never abandoned the idea of an independent exhibition, but left it to slowly ripen as they continued to work.

Friends of the artists worried about the consequences of such an exhibit. The famous critic Théodore Duret advised them to continue seeking success at the Salon. He felt that it would be impossible for them to achieve fame through group exhibits: the public largely ignored such exhibits, which were only attended by the artists and the admirers who already knew them. Duret suggested that they select their most finished works for the Salon, works with a subject, traditional composition, and colour that was not too pure: in short, that they find a compromise with official art. He thought the only way they could cause a stir and attract the attention of the public and critics was at the Salon. Some of the future Impressionists did endeavour to compromise. In 1872, Renoir painted a huge canvas entitled, Riders in the Bois de Boulogne, which claimed the status of an elevated society portrait. The jury rejected the painting and Renoir displayed it in the Salon des Refusés, which had reopened in 1863. When the time came to organise the first Impressionist exhibit, Bazille was no longer with the group, having died in 1870 in the Franco-German war, so the bold and determined Claude Monet assumed leadership of the young painters. In his opinion they had to create a sensation and achieve success through an independent exhibition, and the others agreed with him.

12. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Bather with a Griffon Dog, 1870.

Oil on canvas, 184 × 115 cm.

Museu de Arte, São Paulo.

13. Alfred Sisley, A Street Scene, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 46.2 cm.

Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norfolk.

14. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Riders in the Bois de Boulogne, 1873.

Oil on canvas, 261 × 226 cm.

Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

15. Édouard Manet, Portrait of Irma Brunner, c.1880.

Pastel on canvas and frame, 53.5 × 44.1 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Exhibiting on their own nevertheless was a little frightening and they tried to invite as many of their friends as possible. In the end, the group of artists exhibiting turned out to be a varied bunch. In addition to a few adherents of the new painting, others joined in who painted in a far different style. Edgar Degas, who joined the group at this moment, proved to be especially active when it came to recruiting participants for the exhibition. He succeeded in attracting his friends, the sculptor Lepic and the engraver de Nittis, both very popular Salon artists. Degas also actively tried to persuade top society painter James Tissot and his friend Legros (who was living in London) to join their cause, but was unsuccessful. At the invitation of Pissarro, they were joined by an employee of the Orleans railroad company who was painting plein-air landscapes named Armand Guillaumin. Paul Cézanne travelled to the exhibit from his native town of Aix-en-Provence, also at Pissarro’s invitation. The young Cézanne had broken with official painting in his earliest works, but he no longer shared the Impressionists’ outlook on art. His participation may have aroused the concern of Édouard Manet, who definitely had been invited. According to his contemporaries, Manet said that he would never exhibit alongside Cézanne. But Manet may have simply preferred a different path. According to Monet, Manet encouraged Monet and Renoir to continue in their attempts to conquer the Salon. Manet found the Salon to be the best battlefield. In Degas’s opinion, Manet was prevented from joining them because of vanity. “The realist movement doesn’t need to fight with others,” Degas said. “It is, it exists, and it must stand alone. A realist salon is needed. Manet did not understand that. I believe it was due much more to vanity than to intelligence.” (Manet, Paris 1983, Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, p. 29). In the end, neither Manet, nor his best friend, Henri Fantin-Latour exhibited alongside the young artists. The idea of an independent exhibition also frightened Corot, and although he liked the painting of the future Impressionists, he discouraged the young landscape painter Antoine Guillemet from participating. But Corot was unsuccessful in dissuading the courageous Berthe Morisot, a student of both Corot and Manet, whom at that moment joined the future Impressionists.

Finding a location for the exhibit was a difficult problem to solve. It was risky to rent a space to young painters who were not only totally unknown, but who dared challenge the official Salon. “For some time we were automatically rejected by the designated jury, my friends and I,” Claude Monet later remembered. “What were we to do? Just painting wasn’t enough, we had to sell paintings, we had to live. The dealers wouldn’t touch us. Still, we had to exhibit. But where?” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 340). An unexpected solution was found. “Nadar, the great Nadar with the heart of gold, rented us the space,” recalled Monet. (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 340).

16. Berthe Morisot, Reading, 1873.

Oil on canvas, 46 × 71.8 cm.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland.

Nadar was the pseudonym of Gaspard Félix Tournachon, a journalist, writer, draughtsman, and caricaturist. According to a nineteenth-century historian, Nadar was equally well-known in London and Paris, Australia and Europe. A distinguished photographer, he made photographic portraits of his famous contemporaries, including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Eugène Delacroix, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Charles Gounod, Richard Wagner, and Sarah Bernhardt, among many others. But this was not his only claim to fame. He was also a fearless aeronaut. During the Franco-German war, Nadar travelled by balloon over German lines to deliver mail from besieged Paris and it was Nadar in his balloon who got the French war minister, Léon Gambetta, out of the capital in 1871. Nadar was the first person to capture a birds-eye-view of Paris by photographing from the top of an aerostat. He was also the first to photograph the catacombs of Paris, which had opened in the mid-nineteenth century. The second-floor photography studio that he turned over to the future Impressionists, was located in the very heart of Paris, at 35, boulevard des Capucines.

It was unlike the immense galleries that normally housed the Salon exhibitions. “The Salons, with walls covered in dark red wool, are extremely favourable to paintings,” wrote the critic Philippe Burty. “They [the paintings] are side-lit by natural light, as in apartments. They are all separated, which sets them off advantageously.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 288). Canvases of modest dimensions, lost in midst of the Salon’s huge academic paintings, in Nadar’s studio found the optimal conditions for the “free expression of individual talents.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 287).

17. Claude Monet, Springtime, 1872.

Oil on canvas, 50 × 65.5 cm.

Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

One hundred and sixty-five paintings were assembled for the exhibit, the work of thirty rather dissimilar artists. Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne exhibited alongside the four Gleyre pupils. The following artists were also represented: the engraver Félix Braquemont; a friend of Édouard Manet named Zacharie Astruc; Claude Monet’s oldest friend, Eugène Boudin, landscape painter of Le Havre; and Degas’s friend, the sculptor and engraver Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic. Additionally, the extremely fashionable Joseph de Nittis gave in to the exhortations of Degas. The names of the other participants in the first Impressionist exhibition meant little to their contemporaries and have not remained in the history or art. Degas suggested they call their association “Capucin,” after the name of the boulevard, and because it was an unprovocative word that could not be taken politically or assumed to be hostile to the Salon. Eventually they adopted the name Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc. (The Anonymous Society of Artist, Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers). In the words of Philippe Burty: “Along with their quite obvious individual intentions, the group that thus presented itself for review held a common artistic goal: in technique, to reproduce the broad atmospheric effects of outdoor light; in sentiment, to convey the clarity of the immediate sensation.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 288). In fact, only a few of the exhibiting artists expressed both these qualities in their painting: they are the painters that have remained in the history of art under the name of Impressionists.

18. Claude Monet, The Beach at Sainte-Adresse, 1867.

Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 102.5 cm.

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

The term Impressionism not only designates a trend in French art, but also a new stage in the development of European painting. It marked the end of the neo-classical period that had begun during the Renaissance. The Impressionists did not entirely break with the theories of Leonardo da Vinci and the rules according to which all European academies had conceived their paintings for over three centuries. All the Impressionists had more or less followed the lessons of their old-school professors. Each of them had their preferred old masters. But for the Impressionists, the essential thing had changed: their vision of the world and their concept of painting. The Impressionists cast doubt on painting’s literary nature, the necessity of always having to base a painting on a story, and consequently, its link to historical and religious subjects. They chose the genre of landscape because it only referred to nature and nearly all the Impressionists started their artistic itinerary with the landscape. It was a genre that appealed to observation and observation alone, rather than to the imagination, and from observation came the artist’s new view of nature, the logical consequence of all his prior pictorial experience: it was more important to paint what one saw, rather than how one was taught – that was a fact! It was impossible to see the workings of nature within the confines of the studio, so the Impressionists took to the outdoors and set up their easels in fields and forests. The close observation of nature had a power until then undreamt of. If the natural landscape was incompatible with the traditional concept of composition and perspective, then artists had to reject academic rules and obey nature. If traditional pictorial technique stood in the way of conveying the truths artists discovered in nature, then this technique had to be changed. A new genre of painting appeared in the works of the Impressionists that lacked traditional finish and often resembled a rapid oil sketch. But the Impressionists still lacked a new aesthetic theory that could replace tradition. Their one, firm conviction was that they could employ any means to arrive at truth in art. “These daredevils assumed that the work of the artist could be done without professing or practising a religious respect of academic theories and professional practices,” wrote one critic, three years after the first Impressionist exhibition in 1877. “To those who ask them to formulate a program, they cynically reply that they have none. They are happy to give the public the impressions of their hearts and minds, sincerely, naively, without retouching.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 330).

19. Camille Pissarro, The Marne at Chennevières, about 1864–1865.

Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 145.5 cm.

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.