Amazon eBay: Rebelling against the Salon, the French Impressionists caused a revolution in the wellestablished art world, changing the existing rules for technique, color and motive forever. The bustling life of Haussmann’s new modern Paris became the catalyst, birthplace and subject matter for these forerunners of modern art known as the Impressionists. The selection of painters studied includes among others Monet, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Berthe Morisot, Sisley, Bazille, Caillebotte, and Pisarro. Although the word Impressionism now refers to one of the most popular movements in Western Art, it originated as a term of abuse – applied to an exhibition of works that the audience and critics found shockingly sketchy and unfinished. In 1874 fifty-five artists held the first independent group show of Impressionist art in the vacated studios of the celebrated photographer Nadar. Most of them, including Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet and his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot (“a bunch of lunatics and a woman” as an observer muttered) had been rejected by the Salon, and they were unified in their rejection of the old “tame” art encouraged by the official Salon. Although Impressionism defies easy definition, the artists had two fundamental concerns: depicting modern life and/or painting in open air, and they developed a new way of depicting the new modern world around them. Impressionism includes some of the most beloved pictures in the international world: Monet’s dreamy water lilies, Renoir’s young men and women in the dappled sunlight of the open air dance space at the Moulin de la Galette smiling, flirting, dancing on a Sunday afternoon in Paris in the 1870’s, Manet’s provoking “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”, the bustling life of Haussmann’s new modern Paris, the catalyst and the birthplace and the subject matter of much of Impressionist Art.