Edgar Degas, dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, will produce much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.

By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, Degas joins forces with a group of young artists who are intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society.

Degas’s father had died earlier in the year, and in the subsequent settling of the estate it had been discovered that Degas's brother René has amassed enormous business debts.

To preserve the family name, Degas has been forced to sell his house and a collection of art he had inherited.

Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, most of whose works have been consistently rejected by the juries of the official Salon of the French Academy (the state-sponsored annual exhibition), decide to hold their own exhibit.

These founding members of the nascent Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs are joined by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Eugène Boudin.

The celebrated photographer Nadar, whose former studio building at 35 boulevard des Capucines has become a local landmark and a favorite meeting place of the intelligentsia of Paris, lends them his gallery.

On April 15, 1874, the nine painters offer their work for public viewing.

The exhibition itself reveals three main trends.

The Parisian circle around Monet and Renoir has developed the evanescent and sketchlike style the furthest.

The vision of those working near Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers is in general more solid, being firmly rooted in country scenes.

A relatively urbane, genre-like trend is detectable in Degas's picture of Paul Valpinçon and his family at the races called Carriage at the Races (1870-1873; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Morisot's The Cradle (1873; Louvre, Paris).

Cézanne, modeling himself on Pissarro, sublimates the turbulent emotions of his earlier work in pictures that are studied directly and closely from nature. (He will follow the method for the rest of his life.)

Although some critics appreciate the new painting, most subject the artists to ridicule.

Monet exhibits twelve paintings: his Impression: Sunrise (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris) prompts the journalist Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, to dismiss the show as an exhibition of the Impressionist.

Leroy thus unintentionally gives a name to the new artistic movement, as the artists themselves soon adopt the name as descriptive of their intention to accurately convey visual impressions. (The 1874 paintings by these Impressionists will eventually lead to what is now recognized as Modern Art.)

Nadar, a natural showman, is greatly pleased by the storm the exhibit raises; the notoriety is good for business.

The work of Renoir, who has mastered the ability to convey his immediate visual impressions, is a perfect illustration of the Impressionists' new approach in thought and technique.

By using small, multicolored strokes, he evokes the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman's skin in the outdoors.

The six paintings he exhibits show great vitality, emphasizing the pleasures of life despite the financial worries that trouble him. (Finding himself unable to obtain five hundred francs for his La Loge (The Theater Box, 1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London), exhibited at Nadar's, for which his brother and a new model, Nini, had posed, he eventually pressures grumbling Martin pere into paying four hundred and twenty-five for it, the amount he desperately needs for his rent.) (John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th rev. ed. 1973, reprinted 1980)

Cézanne sells one of the two landscapes he shows but arouses derision with a third painting, his Modern Olympia (1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

Paul Gauguin had seen the first Impressionist exhibition, which had completely entranced him and confirmed his desire to become a painter.

He spends some seventeen thousand francs on works by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir and Guillaumin.

Pissarro takes a special interest in his attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should “look for the nature that suits your temperament”.

The twenty-seven-year-old Gauguin begins to study under the supportive older artist, at first struggling to master the techniques of painting and drawing.

The orphaned son of a French journalist and a Peruvian Creole, whose mother had been a writer and a follower of Saint-Simon, had been first aroused by his mother’s very rich lover, businessman Gustave Arosa, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom he had begun painting.

The collection of Arosa, who had become the Gauguin family's legal guardian, includes the work of Camille Corot, Eugéne Delacroix, and Jean-François Millet.

Upon Gauguin's release from the merchant marine in 1872, Arosa had secured a position for him as a stockbroker and introduced him to the Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad, whom Gauguin had married the following year.)

Gauguin had soon begun to receive artistic instruction and to frequent a studio where he could draw from a model.

Paul Cézanne, in Paris until April, spends May to October in Pontoise working with Calille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin and Armand Guillaumin.

He visits Émile Zola in Médan and returns to Aix in November.

John Singer Sargent shows Madame X (c. 1884. Metropolitan Museum of Art), a portrait of Madame Gautreau, a famous Parisian beauty, at the Salon of 1884.

Sargent regards it as his masterpiece (it is probably his best-known picture) and is disagreeably surprised when it causes a scandal: critics find it eccentric and erotic.

Paul Cézanne submits to the Salon, but is rejected despite intervention by Armand Guillaumin.

He will spend most of the year working in and around Aix.

Paul Durand-Ruel is facing bankruptcy.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet try to persuade him to sell paintings for lower prices.

Renoir conceives the idea of a new association of painters, the Société des irrégularistes, whose aesthetic is to be based on irregularity.

Paul Signac, not yet twenty-one, helps found the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, an association “with neither jury nor prizes,” in 1884.

Here, he meets Seurat, whom he initiates into the broken-color technique of Impressionism.

Other founding members of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which will accept the work of any artist who wishes to participate in its annual Salon, include Camille Pissarro, Henri-Edmond Cross, Albert Dubois-Pillet, Maximilien Luce, and Théo Van Rysselberghe.

The group's first show, held in the pavilion of the city of Paris, includes paintings by Odilon Redon, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Cross, Seurat, and Signac.

Signac had given up the study of architecture for painting when he was eighteen, and, through Armand Guillaumin, had became a convert to the coloristic principles of Impressionism.

Artists not backed by the official Académie de peinture et de sculpture in charge of the exhibits at the annual Salon, or without support supplied by actual political constellations, had little chance to advance during the Second Empire.

From year to year the number of artists working in Paris, the number of artists submitting works to the official Salon and the number of works refused by the jury increased, but neither the Second Empire nor the Third Republic had found an answer to this situation.

For years, the artists had counted on official support.

In 1884, finally, the artists begin to organize themselves, and a "Group of independent artists" is authorized by the Ministry of Fine Arts to arrange an exhibition, while the City of Paris agrees to supply rooms for the presentation.

So, from May 15 through July 15, the first "free" exhibition of contemporary art shows more than five thousand works by more than four hundred artists.