Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on 30 October 1839 to English parents. He spent five years in England from 1857 to 1861, and in the country of Shakespeare he felt himself to be English for the first time. He studied English literature, but was even more interested in England’s great master painters. It was most likely in this way – through exposure to the free brushwork of Turner, and Constable’s landscapes, which resembled preparatory studies – that Sisley sensed he had a vocation for the genre. In October 1862 fate brought him to Charles Gleyre’s free studio, where Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille had come to study.…

Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on 30 October 1839 to English parents. He spent five years in England from 1857 to 1861, and in the country of Shakespeare he felt himself to be English for the first time. He studied English literature, but was even more interested in England’s great master painters. It was most likely in this way – through exposure to the free brushwork of Turner, and Constable’s landscapes, which resembled preparatory studies – that Sisley sensed he had a vocation for the genre. In October 1862 fate brought him to Charles Gleyre’s free studio, where Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Frédéric Bazille had come to study.…

Degas was closest to Renoir in the impressionist’s circle, for both favoured the animated Parisian life of their day as a motif in their paintings. Degas did not attend Gleyre’s studio; most likely he first met the future impressionists at the Café Guerbois. Edgar Degas came from a completely different milieu than did Monet, Renoir and Sisley. His grandfather René-Hilaire de Gas, a grain merchant, had been forced to flee from France to Italy in 1793 during the French Revolution. Business prospered for him there. After establishing a bank in Naples, de Gas wed a young girl from a rich Genoan family. Degas preferred to write his name simply as…

The art of Manet was one of the most important aesthetic factors contributing to the emergence of Impressionism. Although he was only twelve years older than Monet, Bazille, Renoir, and Sisely, those painters considered him a master. The originality of Manet’s painting and his independence from academic canons opened new creative horizons for the Impressionists. Manet is one of the most famous artists from the second half of the nineteenth century linked to the impressionists, although he was not really one of them. He had great influence on French painting partly because of the choice he made for his subjects from everyday life, the use of pure colours, and his…

At difficult moments in their lives Monet and the other Impressionists were assisted by their friends. They did not have many, but these provided both material support by buying their paintings and, more importantly, the warmth of their friendship. Among them were the amateur painter Gustave Caillebotte, who had exhibited along with the Impressionists and who enjoyed a considerable fortune. The baritone of the Paris Opera, Jean-Baptiste Faure, bought paintings by Édouard Manet and some Impressionists, including many paintings by Monet. The Parisian civil servant Victor Chocquet bought paintings by the Impressionists as soon as he had sufficient funds. Dr. Gachet owned some works by Monet and his friends, whom…

For Claude Monet the designation “Impressionist” always remained a source of pride. He chose a single genre for himself, landscape painting, and in that he achieved a degree of perfection none of his contemporaries managed to attain. Claude Monet loved Normandy passionately, and always considered it his true country. Yet he was born in Paris, on Rue Lafitte, and baptized Claude Oscar on 14 November 1840. In 1845, when Claude was five years old, his father opened a small store in Le Havre. With his father’s consent Claude went to Paris for two months in 1854, and later extended his stay. The city fascinated him, the Louvre was inexhaustible, and…

The first episode introduced the origin of the Impressionist movement, and here is the second episode: Pierre Auguste Renoir, a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. Pierre Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. He was the sixth child in the family of Léonard Renoir and Marguerite Merlet. Three years later, in 1844, the Renoirs moved to Paris. In 1848 Auguste began attending a school run by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes. Renoir excelled in musical theory and was soon accepted into the choir at the Église Saint-Eustache, directed by the composer Charles Gounod. Fate, however, decided otherwise. In 1854, the boy’s parents took…

The adventurers of art at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 19th  and the beginning of the 20th century; a saga that reads like a novel, the one of transgressions, the one of shape and colour. Here is the first episode: it tells the story of the artists who rebelled against the establishment and initiated the Impressionism in painting. Impression: Sunrise was the prescient title of one of Claude Monet’s paintings shown in 1874 in the first exhibition of the Impressionists, or as they called themselves then, the Société anonyme des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs (the Anonymous Society of Artist, Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers). Monet…