Manet is friendly with Monet and the…

Manet is friendly with Monet and the others, but despite the insistence of Monet and Degas he does not participate in their independent exhibition.

Hoping for academic success, he continues to submit his paintings to the Salon, which accepts his painting set in the Gare Saint-Lazare, The Railway (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), influenced by the Impressionist palette.

However, the Salon rejects his two other submissions, The Artist (Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin) and The Laundress.

In the last few months of 1874, Manet's friend Stéphane Mallarmé, schoolteacher and leading Symbolist poet, edits a magazine in which he protests the Salon's rejection of Manet's paintings.

Jules Bastien-Lepage, a French painter of rustic outdoor scenes who studied under Alexandre Cabanel, had first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870; he wins a medal at the Salon of 1874 for Spring Song, which stylistically owes a little to Manet.

Mary Cassatt, a regular Salon exhibitor who shares with the Impressionists an interest in experiment and in using bright colors inspired by the out-of-doors, in this year chooses Paris as her permanent residence and establishes her studio here.