![]() Degas invited Morisot to join their risky effort. She had been accepted to the Salon, but her work had become more experimental since then. Berthe Morisot was a friend of both Degas and Manet (she would marry Édouard Manet’s brother Eugène by the end of 1874). Monet, Renoir, Degas, and Sisley had met through classes. He wanted Paris to come to him and accept him-even if he had to endure their ridicule in the process. Manet had set up his own pavilion during the 1867 World’s Fair, but he was not interested in giving up on the Salon jury. The impressionists regarded Manet as their inspiration and leader in their spirit of revolution, but Manet had no desire to join their cooperative venture into independent exhibitions. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas, 131 x 175 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) The Impressionists held eight exhibitions from 1874 through 1886. They called themselves the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Printmakers and their first show opened at about the same time as the annual Salon in May 1874. ![]() The artists pooled their money, rented a studio that belonged to the photographer Nadar, and set a date for their first collective exhibition. ![]() Edgar Degas, The Ballet Class, 1871-1874, oil on canvas, 75 x 85 cm (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) They needed to show their work and they wanted to sell it. They all had experienced rejection by the Salon jury in recent years and felt that waiting an entire year between exhibitions wastoo long. The artists we know today as Impressionists-Claude Monet, August Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley (and several others)-could not afford to wait for France to accept their work. The works exhibited at the Salon were chosen by a jury-which could often be quite arbitrary. For most of the nineteenth century then, the Salon was the only way to exhibit your work (and therefore the only way to establish your reptutation and make a living as an artist). This may not seem like much in an era like ours, when art galleries are everywhere in major cities, but in Paris at this time, there was one official, state-sponsored exhibition-called the Salon-and very few art galleries devoted to the work of living artists. The group of artists who became known as the Impressionists did something ground-breaking in addition to painting their sketchy, light-filled canvases: they established their own exhibition. This painting was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. Claude Monet, Impression Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 48 x 63 cm (Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris).
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