The so-called Impressionists, a group drawing its name from Claude Monet’s 1872 painting, Impression, Sunrise, and led by Claude Monet, Pierre August Renoir, Camille Pissaro, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne, among many others, take the art world by storm.

The French school abandons traditional linear representation; the painters’ main concern is the use of small dashes and strokes of color to reflect the effects of light and atmosphere.

Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863) is a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose is based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538).

As he had in Luncheon on the Grass (1863), Manet had again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist.

The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting The Nude Maja (1800).

Manet had embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display.

His uniquely frank depiction of a self-assured prostitute is accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865, where it created a scandal.

According to Antonin Proust, "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" by offended viewers. (Manet by Gilles Neret (2003; Taschen).

The painting is controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuate her nakedness, sexuality, and comfortable courtesan lifestyle.

The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers are all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time.

This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankles viewers.

The painting's flatness, inspired by Japanese wood block art, serves to make the nude more human and less voluptuous.

A fully dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the theory, current at this time, that black people are hyper-sexed.

That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

Olympia's body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational.

She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors.

Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

A contemporary critic denounces Olympia's "shamelessly flexed" left hand, which seemed to him a mockery of the relaxed, shielding hand of Titian's Venus. (Hunter, Dianne. Seduction and theory: readings of gender, representation, and rhetoric. University of Illinois Press, 1989. p. 19.)

Likewise, the alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino.

"Olympia" is the subject of caricatures in the popular press, but is championed by the French avant-garde community, and the painting's significance is appreciated by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin.

As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raises the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society.

The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works is seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copies or uses as source material.

His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint.

He becomes friends with the painters—later to be known as Impressionists—Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro through another painter, Berthe Morisot, who is a member of the group and draws him into their activities.

The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Morisot had had her first painting accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864, and she will continue to show in the salon for the next ten years.

Edgar Degas had exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1865, when the jury accepted his painting Scene of War in the Middle Ages, which attracted little attention.

The painting is arguably his most curious composition, in which nine female nudes are shot, or are being shot at, by fifteenth-century mounted archers who ride stirrupless, with the horses’ harnesses barely sketched in.

Degas was born in Paris, France, the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, and Augustin De Gas, a banker.

The family was moderately wealthy.

Degas' mother had died when he was thirteen, after which his father and grandfather were the main influences on his early life.

At age eleven, Degas (in adulthood he will abandon the more pretentious spelling of the family name) had begun his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.

Degas had begun to paint early in life.

By the age of eighteen, he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and in 1853 he had registered as a copyist in the Louvre.

His father, however, had expected him to go to law school.

Degas had duly enrolled at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies.

In 1855, Degas had met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom he revered, and whose advice he will never forget: "Draw lines, young man, and still more lines, both from life and from memory, and you will become a good artist." (Werner, Alfred (1969) Degas Pastels. New York: Watson-Guptill. p. 14)

In April of that same year, Degas had received admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he had flourished, following the style of Ingres.

In July 1856, Degas had traveled to Italy, where he remains for the next three years.

In 1858, while staying with his aunt's family in Naples, he had made the first studies for his early masterpiece, The Bellelli Family.

He also drew and painted numerous copies after Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance but, contrary to conventional practice, he usually selected from an altarpiece a detail that had caught his attention—a secondary figure, or a head which he treated as a portrait.

Upon his return to France in 1859, Degas had moved into a Paris studio large enough to permit him to begin painting The Bellelli Family—an imposing canvas he intensed for exhibition in the Salon, although it will remain unfinished until 1867.

He also began work on several history paintings: Alexander and Bucephalus and The Daughter of Jephthah in 1859–60; Sémiramis Building Babylon in 1860; and Young Spartans around 1860.

In 1861, Degas had visited his childhood friend Paul Valpinçon in Normandy, and had made the earliest of his many studies of horses.

Degas will exhibit annually in the Salon during the next five years, but he will submit no more history paintings, and his Steeplechase—The Fallen Jockey (Salon of 1866) signals his growing commitment to contemporary subject matter.

The change in his art is influenced primarily by the example of Édouard Manet, whom Degas had met in 1864 (while both were copying the same Velázquez portrait in the Louvre, according to a story that may be apocryphal).

One of Edgar Degas's New Orleans works, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, had garnered favorable attention back in France, and will be his only work purchased by a museum (that of Pau, France) during his lifetime.

At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Degas had enlisted in the National Guard, where his defense of Paris had left him little time for painting.

During rifle training, his eyesight was found to be defective, and for the rest of his life his eye problems will be a constant worry to him.

After the war, in 1872, Degas had begun an extended stay in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his brother René and a number of other relatives live.

Staying at the home of his Creole uncle, Michel Musson, on Esplanade Avenue, Degas had produced a number of works, many depicting family members.

Degas was to return to Europe in January 1873, but when his return trip was delayed, he was asked by his relatives to paint their portraits, and decided to show them as a group, at work in the family office.

Degas has crafted his work with the intent of selling it to a British textile manufacturer, but a drop in stock prices worldwide and declines in the cotton and art markets had ended his hopes for that specific sale.

Degas will next exhibit A Cotton Office in New Orleans in the second Impressionist show in Paris in 1876, and will finally sell the painting in 1878 to the newly founded Musee des Beaux-Arts in Pau.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)