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00:00:04Early in October of 1869, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir readied themselves for a painting
00:00:11expedition. Both of the young artists were desperately short of cash. It had taken them
00:00:22all summer long to scrape together enough money to buy their painting supplies.
00:00:36Now, they were eager to experiment. Rather than transcribe the details of a scene, they
00:00:50wanted to capture a fleeting moment in time. The shimmer of water. The reflection of light.
00:01:00The movement of people.
00:01:21As Monet and Renoir painted by the River Seine, they were rejecting everything that was expected
00:01:28and traditional in art. And together with a few like-minded artists, they were about to
00:01:35launch what was not just a new style of painting, but a revolution in the world of art. A revolution
00:01:45that would become known as Impressionism.
00:02:02Impressionism is now seen as a very comfortable art. We love it. We find it very serene and pleasing.
00:02:10Impressionist art, when it happened, was the toughest, most radical, most challenging
00:02:16art of any period in history. It was one of the big breaks in history of art.
00:02:26There's a story in Impressionism of overturning the past and starting the history of art all
00:02:32over again. But there's also a marvelous story of a group of individuals who were so different
00:02:39and so brave and so humorous and so willing to work with each other that they could make
00:02:48this incredible thing in the history of art happen.
00:03:13Claude Monet, uncompromising and demanding of himself and everyone around him. He is a
00:03:20artist. He expected fame and wealth from the beginning.
00:03:26Auguste Renoir was nostalgic and respectful of artistic tradition. A painter of modern life, Renoir would
00:03:34eventually turn his back on all that was modern.
00:03:39Berthe Morisot was brilliant at maintaining an image of absolute respectability. At a time when it was not
00:03:47respectable for a woman to be a professional artist. Camille Pissarro considered himself an anarchist. But in practice, he was
00:03:59kind and soft-spoken.
00:04:02His friends thought of him as God the Father. Edgar Degas was argumentative and obsessive. A perfectionist until the day
00:04:13he died, Degas could barely bring himself to call a word.
00:04:17His work finished. They shared one simple but entirely radical idea. That it was time to discard the rules of
00:04:29the past and paint what they saw through their own eyes.
00:04:35Through what they called their sensation.
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00:05:45In the spring of 1859, a young, aspiring painter took the long journey from the Normandy coast to Paris. The
00:05:57young painter was
00:05:5819-year-old Claude Monet. He was eager to get his first look at the Salon, the state-run art
00:06:05show.
00:06:11The Salon was a huge event. Hundreds of thousands came each year to see art jammed floor to ceiling in
00:06:20gallery after gallery.
00:06:27In 1859, there was no such thing as impressionism. The art on display was academic art. And the most respected
00:06:39works were full of mythological or religious themes and were known as history paintings.
00:06:48Monet hoped to one day have his art exhibited at the Salon. For acceptance in the Salon was the only
00:06:55way an artist could gain real recognition. But Monet had no intention of making history paintings.
00:07:06Still, he did want to stay in Paris and develop his craft as a painter. His father agreed to help
00:07:12him with an allowance, if he studied with an established master.
00:07:19Monet took the allowance but ignored his father's wishes. He joined the Académie Suisse, which wasn't actually an academy, but
00:07:28a space where artists could come to draw the nude without instruction.
00:07:33When his father found out, he was furious.
00:07:38The long-standing tale is that his father cut him off. He felt that if he wasn't going to be
00:07:44part of a studio, that this was not the way he was supposed to go about a career.
00:07:49That if he was going to live higgily-piggily in Paris, then that was his choice, so he would have
00:07:53to make it on his own.
00:07:56It was still normal for an artist to have to go through a process of drawing from casts and then
00:08:01drawing from the live model and learning from the art of classical antiquity.
00:08:06Monet already felt, when he first went to Paris in 1859, that an artist should learn from what he saw
00:08:11around him and not learn from formal rules.
00:08:14And at the same time, he's clearly somebody who cultivated an image as a teenage rebel.
00:08:19He's always concerned with projecting an image of somebody who acquired notoriety not only through his art, but actually through
00:08:27who he was.
00:08:30I could never bend to any rule, Monet once said, even as a very small child.
00:08:40Claude Monet was born November 14, 1840, the second son of Louise Justine and Adolph Monet.
00:08:50They were hard-working merchants in the port town of Le Havre.
00:08:55The young Monet had little interest in school, and he spent as much time as he could on the cliffs
00:09:02and beaches around Le Havre.
00:09:06From early on, he loved to draw.
00:09:10By the time he was a teenager, Monet was making caricatures of notable Le Havre citizens.
00:09:19He was quite good at it, and before long, the local stationer displayed Monet's drawings in the shop window.
00:09:31His work sold well, at 20 francs apiece.
00:09:37While at the stationer's one day, he met a local landscape artist, Eugène Boudin.
00:09:45I hope you are not going to confine yourself to this sort of thing, Boudin said.
00:09:49And he invited Monet to paint with him in the open air along the Normandy coast.
00:10:02Boudin helped spark Monet's passion for landscape painting, a passion that would never leave him.
00:10:12Monet described his work with Boudin as if it were like the rending of a veil.
00:10:18I understood, he said, what painting could be.
00:10:22My destiny as a painter opened up before me.
00:10:28Monet probably expected to be famous from very early on.
00:10:33The first painting from his hand is a highly accomplished picture that was submitted to an exhibition in Le Havre
00:10:40in 1858.
00:10:41And it is spectacular.
00:10:44It is also an example of an artist who was truly gifted.
00:10:48So he knew he had it within himself to go down into history, and he was determined to do it.
00:10:56In the spring of 1859, Monet left Le Havre carrying his art supplies and his life savings of 2,000
00:11:05francs.
00:11:07He was headed for the capital of art, Paris.
00:11:23At the Académie Suisse, Claude Monet met another student who had no interest in academic training.
00:11:31His name was Camille Pissarro, a 29-year-old from the West Indies island of St. Thomas.
00:11:41Like Monet, Pissarro wanted to portray everyday life rather than the mythology of the past.
00:11:58Pissarro had in fact painted scenes of everyday life from the time he was a boy in St. Thomas.
00:12:14From the beginning, he sketched these portraits of young slaves, but with none of those kind of sentimental, fatherly type
00:12:24of approach.
00:12:24There was a directness and a simplicity that was very, very unusual.
00:12:30Clearly, he felt very much at home with people of a different context, of a different social milieu from his.
00:12:42Pissarro felt at home with people of a different social milieu, because he did not feel at home within his
00:12:49own community.
00:12:55Pissarro's father, Frederick, a Jewish immigrant from Bordeaux, France, had married a member of his own family, his aunt Rachel,
00:13:03breaking Jewish law.
00:13:07The Jewish community in St. Thomas would forever scorn the Pissarros for this illegitimate union.
00:13:18Camille Pissarro was the ultimate outsider.
00:13:20St. Thomas is a small place, and when your mom and dad aren't legitimately married, and, you know, they can't,
00:13:27they're not recognized in the synagogue,
00:13:28and the other Jews don't like them, and blah, blah, blah, it's a kind of situation in which you have
00:13:33to learn to persist and to keep on going.
00:13:38By the time he was a teenager, Pissarro knew he wanted to be an artist.
00:13:44But his father wanted him to help run the family store.
00:13:49Pissarro's father expected his son to pick up the business and to become a dutiful son who would follow his
00:13:58parents' footsteps.
00:13:59Not only did he not do that, he ran away from home to become what? An artist? God forbid.
00:14:04This is just something that was absolutely unacceptable.
00:14:11When Pissarro ran away in 1852, he left behind his middle-class life, determined to make his way as an
00:14:20artist.
00:14:21He traveled through the West Indies and on to Venezuela.
00:14:36And in 1855, he settled in Paris.
00:14:42Once there, he managed to reconcile with his parents.
00:14:47They had recently moved to Paris themselves and set up housekeeping with a generous staff of servants.
00:14:57One of the servants was 21-year-old Julie Vellet.
00:15:01She posed for Pissarro in 1858, and the two secretly began an affair.
00:15:10He happened to fall in love with a very simple, simple woman who barely could read.
00:15:15Not even the cook of his parents, but the cook's help.
00:15:21When Pissarro broke the news to his parents, it gave them the shock of their lives.
00:15:27Julie was not only a lowly servant girl, she was Catholic, and she was pregnant.
00:15:34Well, the Pissarro's mother just absolutely refused to have anything to do with Julie.
00:15:40The Pissarros fired Julie and cut off their son's allowance.
00:15:50Julie suffered a miscarriage, but Pissarro refused to leave her.
00:15:58They would go on to have eight children over the next 21 years.
00:16:04And their relationship would last the rest of their lives.
00:16:24Pissarro's mother never acknowledged Julie,
00:16:27but before long she put aside just enough of her outrage
00:16:31to send her son a small monthly allowance.
00:16:43Camille Pissarro escaped the family turmoil
00:16:46by concentrating ever harder on his landscape painting and figure drawing.
00:16:54While sketching the nude at Académie Suisse late in 1859,
00:16:59Pissarro met Claude Monet.
00:17:07Pissarro and Monet were soon off together on painting expeditions.
00:17:12They portrayed scenes that had traditionally been considered unworthy of attention.
00:17:18A telegraph tower.
00:17:20An open field.
00:17:23A dreary factory.
00:17:27They painted subjects that were not imbued with cultural meaning.
00:17:31If I went out and painted the suburbs, you'd think, oh my God, you know, what is this?
00:17:35Is there any meaning in this?
00:17:37And that was what the French thought.
00:17:39By choosing their own countryside, they did something radical.
00:17:44They did something, they made images out of an unholy or an unhistorical landscape.
00:17:50There's no doubt that the notion that we in the 19th century, that is, were in a new age, contributed
00:17:57to the desire for artists and for musicians and the like to be able to look at their time and
00:18:04to find the values in that moment.
00:18:09Not to look to the past or to mythology, but to really look at the ways in which their own
00:18:14civilization was reshaping the concepts of the world.
00:18:25Monet could not have been happier except for one thing.
00:18:30Between his painting trips, the studio costs, and his particular enjoyment of big city nightlife, Monet was living beyond his
00:18:39means.
00:18:41His savings of 2,000 francs was quickly depleted.
00:18:47Life could be relatively cheap if somebody had somewhere to live.
00:18:51Obviously, subsistence is one thing, comfort is something else, and Monet certainly, ideally, expected comfort.
00:18:58He always loved fancy shirts with ruffles on it. He liked to drink better wines.
00:19:05So there were occasions when, plenty of occasions, when he was short of ready cash.
00:19:16But Monet did not get much time to make his way in Paris.
00:19:22In March of 1860, he was conscripted into the peacetime army for seven years of service.
00:19:31Monet's father offered to pay the government for a replacement for his son, a common practice for those wealthy enough
00:19:37to afford it.
00:19:39In return, he wanted his son back home to help in the family store.
00:19:45Claude Monet refused the offer, and instead opted to join the cavalry in Algeria.
00:19:53He felt that an adventure in Algeria was preferable to a mundane life as a shopkeeper.
00:20:04But Monet paid a heavy price for his decision.
00:20:10His career as an artist was now on indefinite hold.
00:20:34His career as an artist was now on indefinite hold.
00:20:37Auguste Renoir enrolled in L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the School of Fine Arts, the training ground for academic artists.
00:20:50At the age of 20, Renoir had already had a successful career as a porcelain painter.
00:20:58But at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he soon ran into trouble.
00:21:02Renoir had entered a studio class run by Charles Gleyre,
00:21:07an academic artist who insisted on the primacy of drawing, line, and form.
00:21:15Renoir liked to paint with brighter colors.
00:21:18Gleyre was concerned that devilish color, as he called it, might go to a student's head.
00:21:26As polite and as respectful of authority as he was,
00:21:30I think when he came to paint and draw, even from a very early time,
00:21:34he did not accept any tutelage.
00:21:37He was not prepared to have someone tell him that this was not the way to do it.
00:21:43Gleyre saw little promise in Renoir,
00:21:46and Renoir's wealthier classmates saw him only as an outsider.
00:21:51He starts off coming from a lowly background.
00:21:55Renoir gets himself into a quite different world because he becomes a fine artist.
00:22:00He moves from being an artisan or a decorator to painting fine art for art exhibitions.
00:22:06He goes into this world that people associated with elevated status,
00:22:12which is totally different from this humble background that he came from.
00:22:18Renoir had grown up the sixth child of seven in the slums that stood in the shadows of the Louvre.
00:22:27But instead of running with the boys in his neighborhood,
00:22:30he roamed through the great museum, absorbing the work of the masters.
00:22:40As a little boy, Auguste decorated the walls of his home with drawings made from charcoal he'd taken from the
00:22:47stove.
00:22:49When he turned 15, his parents apprenticed him to a porcelain painter.
00:22:56His new boss was impressed, and the young Renoir was soon earning the handsome salary of 20 francs a month.
00:23:06Renoir carefully saved every centime he could to fund his art education.
00:23:12And in 1861, he began his official studies in the studio of Charles Gleyre.
00:23:20I was always quiet in my corner, very attentive, very docile, studying the model, listening to the teacher.
00:23:28And it was I who they called the revolutionary, Auguste Renoir.
00:23:40Renoir kept up his studies at Gleyre's for month after month,
00:23:45doing his best to capture the line and form of the model.
00:24:01Renoir had been at Gleyre's for an entire year when three new students entered the studio.
00:24:08And soon, he was part of a circle of like-minded friends,
00:24:12which included Frédéric Bazille, a 21-year-old with plenty of money,
00:24:19Alfred Sisley, a Parisian born of English expatriates,
00:24:24and a 22-year-old, fresh out of the army, Claude Monet.
00:24:31After a year of peacetime cavalry service, Monet had come down with typhoid fever,
00:24:36and was sent home to recover.
00:24:40Adolph Monet once again offered to buy out his son's army service.
00:24:44And this time, he would allow the young Monet to go back to Paris to paint.
00:24:50But first, he made his expectations clear.
00:24:55Get it into your head that you are going to work seriously this time.
00:25:00I want to see you in a studio, under the discipline of a reputable master.
00:25:06If you decide to be independent again, I shall cut off your allowance without a word.
00:25:15Monet immediately set off for Paris.
00:25:19And in the autumn of 1862, he entered the studio of Charles Glair.
00:25:25Like Renoir before him, Monet ran into trouble with Glair.
00:25:30Not bad. Not bad at all, that thing there.
00:25:34But it is too much in the character of the model.
00:25:37He has enormous feet.
00:25:39You render them as they are.
00:25:42All that is very ugly.
00:25:44When one draws a figure,
00:25:47one should always remember the art of classical antiquity.
00:25:52Charles Glair
00:25:55I can only paint what I can see, Monet replied.
00:25:59He stayed with Glair to keep his father happy.
00:26:02But he was an uninterested student.
00:26:09Monet soon led his new friends, Renoir, Sisley and Basile,
00:26:14out of the studio to paint landscapes in the open air.
00:26:32Camille Pissarro, Monet's friend from the Académie Suisse, joined in their expeditions.
00:26:46Monet drove himself hard.
00:26:49And he pushed his friends to do the same.
00:26:55Monet puts himself under a lot of pressure physically when he is working.
00:26:59And I am sure that when his friends were working with him,
00:27:01that he would have expected them to do just the same.
00:27:04And as he was, in a sense, the leader, the most charismatic of them,
00:27:08I am sure they would have followed suit.
00:27:10They would have done what he asked,
00:27:11in order to show that they were worthy of tagging along
00:27:13with this great force of nature that he was presenting himself as.
00:27:19Monet had established himself as the leader,
00:27:22the driving force behind his small band of artist friends.
00:27:31Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro
00:27:34would be at the center of a new movement in art.
00:27:39It would be a decade before this movement would be called Impressionism.
00:28:10In Paris, early in 1863, Claude Monet and Frédéric Bazille went to see the work of Édouard Manet,
00:28:19a 31-year-old painter whose work, The Bath, had suddenly captured all attention.
00:28:27But the attention was all negative.
00:28:30The public stared with open jaw.
00:28:33The critics raged.
00:28:35And even Emperor Napoleon III weighed in, deeming the work immodest.
00:28:43With The Bath, which he later renamed Déjeuner sur l'herbe,
00:28:49Édouard Manet catapulted himself into the limelight
00:28:52and into position as the new leader of the avant-garde.
00:28:58He had violated the academic rule that nudes were to look like goddesses.
00:29:05Manet's nude appeared to be a modern Parisian woman.
00:29:12I think that after the Déjeuner sur l'herbe Manet is always visible.
00:29:16People remembered that picture.
00:29:18And certainly for younger artists who were looking at modern life subjects,
00:29:22like the group that turns out to be the Impressionists,
00:29:24Manet is there absolutely a focus and also a personal friend, a supporter,
00:29:28when they all get to know each other.
00:29:42And they all got to know each other at the Café Guerboire.
00:29:48Claude Manet brought his friends Sisley and Basile,
00:29:52as well as Renoir and Pissarro.
00:29:58Édouard Manet was a fixture there.
00:30:01And Manet's friend, the painter Edgar Degas,
00:30:04often showed up, started an argument,
00:30:07and then left in the middle of it.
00:30:12Manet had first met Degas at the Louvre in 1861.
00:30:18For Degas, the Louvre was the Holy of Holies.
00:30:21It was his temple.
00:30:23He wasn't a religious man, but if he had a religion, it was art,
00:30:26and that's where he went to worship and pay homage.
00:30:29He would go there regularly to copy, to draw, all the way through his life.
00:30:36The masters must be copied again and again.
00:30:41And only after having given every indication of being a good copyist
00:30:46can you reasonably be given leave to draw a radish from nature.
00:30:52Edgar Degas
00:30:57Degas had first applied to copy the masters at the Louvre a decade earlier,
00:31:02just after he'd finished his schooling in 1853.
00:31:24He worked to perfect his technique in preparation for his first submission
00:31:28to the one and only major art exhibition each year, the Salon.
00:31:36But a year passed, and then another, and Degas seemed unable to paint anything he thought satisfactory.
00:31:46His father, Auguste, who had been supporting his grown son with an ample allowance, grew impatient.
00:31:54Our Raphael is still working, but he has yet to turn out a finished product.
00:32:01Meanwhile, the years are slipping by.
00:32:06Auguste Degas.
00:32:10Auguste was a banker who seemed to pay more attention to Renaissance art than to managing finances.
00:32:17Edgar Degas's mother, Celestine, had died when he was only 13 years old.
00:32:23And Edgar, the oldest of five children, seemed to keep his grief to himself.
00:32:30Frankly, Degas lacked love.
00:32:33He grew up, I think, emotionally stunted, for want of a better word.
00:32:38And perhaps he never really caught up.
00:32:42He never really made good.
00:32:46Degas got his own studio in 1859 and spent much of his time there alone.
00:32:55It seems to me, Degas said, that if one wants to be a serious artist,
00:33:00one must constantly immerse oneself in solitude.
00:33:09Degas found himself lonely and depressed.
00:33:14He painted his own image over and over again.
00:33:21Always with the same dark expression.
00:33:28He was easily discouraged.
00:33:32Doubted his own ability.
00:33:35Worried endlessly.
00:33:41As a young man, there were moments when he really withdrew into himself.
00:33:49There were periods of his life that we can point to where he seems to have gone through something that
00:33:54would be called depression today.
00:34:09He continued to paint history painting after history painting.
00:34:15And he still was not satisfied with his work.
00:34:22Degas would make sketch after sketch.
00:34:25Revise.
00:34:28Make preliminary compositions.
00:34:32Revise again.
00:34:39Then he would start his final version on canvas.
00:34:44Only to scrape off and begin again.
00:34:58What Degas was trying to do was probably impossible.
00:35:02One side of him was telling him, as a young artist, he needed to paint these big, grand, ambitious compositions.
00:35:09In a rather traditional manner, which would go in the salon and announce his talent.
00:35:15Another part of him was pulling him in a completely different direction.
00:35:19He was getting interested in modern life painting.
00:35:22And that dichotomy that he was, he had his feet still in the past, but his artistic world was that
00:35:29of the modern late 19th century, was tearing these pictures apart in some ways.
00:35:37Degas kept on creating history paintings.
00:35:40But he also began, in the autumn of 1861, to paint modern subjects.
00:35:48Degas enjoyed the horse races, and endlessly sketched scenes at the track.
00:35:55But instead of placing the horses in the midst of a mythical battle, Degas painted them as he saw them.
00:36:11With the horse races, Degas had found a subject that he would return to, again and again.
00:36:19In about half a dozen pictures, he experimented with modern techniques for bringing across, for example, the excitement of being
00:36:28in a crowd of people, watching horses moving at great speed.
00:36:32And the sense of bustle, and the sense of noise, and so on, that you get at a race track.
00:36:39He cuts off horses at the side of the picture.
00:36:47He puts in bright colours in the jockey's shirts, and in the saddles, etc.
00:36:54He's really trying to make new, lively, quite disruptive painting.
00:37:11Degas was still an unknown painter in 1865.
00:37:16But his friend, Edouard Manet, was once again on center stage.
00:37:23Manet's salon submission, Olympia, a painting of a woman who appeared to be a prostitute, generated even more outrage than
00:37:31had his déjeuner sur l'herbe two years earlier.
00:37:36Manet did receive congratulations on some seascapes, but the congratulations did not make him happy.
00:37:44For the seascapes weren't by Manet, but by Monet.
00:37:49Manet, the great figure of that moment, had this very controversial nude painting there.
00:37:55And right nearby was Monet's beautiful picture of the beach at Cent' Address.
00:38:03Critics came along, and then were saying,
00:38:05Is it Manet? Is it Monet? Is it Manet? Is it Monet?
00:38:07And, of course, the young pup, Monet, being junior to Mr. Manet, was undoubtedly pleased with that kind of confusion.
00:38:14Whereas the elder Manet, it is often said, was a little distressed that somebody was either appropriating his fame, or
00:38:21indeed, even confusing with his name.
00:38:25Confusion aside, Monet was in fact well received.
00:38:29He had submitted his work to the salon for the first time that year, and the critics immediately took notice.
00:38:37Monsieur Monet, unknown yesterday, has made a reputation by this picture alone.
00:38:43His seascape is the most original and supple, the most strongly and harmoniously painted, to be exhibited in a long
00:38:51time.
00:38:56The praise lifted his spirits, but it did not fatten his wallet.
00:39:02Monet was low on money.
00:39:04But this didn't stop him from making big plans.
00:39:09From Paris, he traveled to Fontainebleau Forest, where he began work on a large-scale painting for the salon.
00:39:17He would name it, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Luncheon on the Grass.
00:39:24Monet hoped the painting would make him famous.
00:39:29But this time, his outsized ambition would get the best of him.
00:39:55My dear Basile, if you don't answer me by return mail, I'll think you've refused to help me out.
00:40:02I'm in despair.
00:40:03I beg you, my dear friend, don't leave me in the lurch.
00:40:08I no longer think of anything but my painting.
00:40:11And if I don't manage to bring it off, I think I'll go mad.
00:40:16Monet.
00:40:20Claude Monet was in Fontainebleau Forest in the summer of 1865, waiting for Basile to compose for his new painting.
00:40:29While he waited, he painted the effect of light filtering through leaves.
00:40:34And he painted studies in preparation for a work he would call Déjeuner sur l'herbe.
00:40:43Basile finally arrived in late August, ready to model for several of the figures.
00:40:51Monet had a female model with him as well, 19-year-old Camille Dancieux.
00:41:01He was doing something that was really insanely ambitious.
00:41:04He was trying to do something that would, in some ways, out-shadow Manet's famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe.
00:41:16As Monet stood painting at his easel one morning, he was suddenly struck in the leg by an errant throw
00:41:22of a metal discus.
00:41:27Basile helped him into bed and rigged up a mechanism to drip cool water on the wound to reduce the
00:41:34swelling.
00:41:36With Monet unable to stand on his injured leg, the only artwork that got finished was Basile's, the improvised field
00:41:44hospital, painted in their room at the inn, Lyon d'Or.
00:41:52In October of 1865, Monet returned to Paris and started his final version of Déjeuner sur l'herbe on a
00:42:01canvas that stood 15 feet high and 20 feet long for a grand total of 300 square feet.
00:42:11This vast canvas, this Dejeuner sur l'herbe was going to be the biggest painting he'd ever painted.
00:42:17Monet was very ambitious. He was ambitious from the beginning and everybody knew it.
00:42:23But early in 1866, after eight months of struggle, Monet stopped working on Déjeuner sur l'herbe.
00:42:31He decided that he could not finish the painting in time for the salon.
00:42:38Not long after Monet abandoned his huge project,
00:42:42Édouard Manet changed the name of his The Bath to Déjeuner sur l'herbe.
00:42:49Manet, Degas commented, could do nothing but imitate.
00:42:55Meanwhile, Monet was determined to get something substantial done for the salon.
00:43:02He borrowed a fancy green dress for his model Camille and quickly set to work.
00:43:08He was trying to meet the salon deadline.
00:43:12Monet didn't waste time worrying about the pose or the style of the dress.
00:43:17It appears, in fact, that he took his inspiration from the pages of a popular fashion magazine.
00:43:25In the 1860s, Emile Zola had written of the group which had become called the Impressionists,
00:43:32that they wanted to be able to capture the beauties of their moment.
00:43:37And that is a concept which ran very deeply through Monet and other Impressionists.
00:43:44Monet worked furiously, almost non-stop.
00:43:48He'd again set himself a steep challenge.
00:43:51The portrait of Camille was life-size, on a canvas that stood nearly eight feet tall.
00:43:57Nonetheless, Monet managed to finish in a matter of days, just in time to submit his painting to the salon
00:44:04jury in March of 1866.
00:44:09The jury found his woman in a green dress acceptable, and Claude Monet was in the salon for the second
00:44:16year in a row.
00:44:18And for the second year in a row, he received glowing reviews.
00:44:23Now there is a temperament, the journalist Emile Zola commented.
00:44:27There is a man among eunuchs.
00:44:36With the help of the favorable notices, Monet was able to sell several paintings.
00:44:42With money in his pocket, he traveled to Ville d'Avray to paint for the summer.
00:44:49Monet wanted to take the idea of painting out of doors, en plein air, to a new level.
00:44:57Claude Monet was ready to make a clean break with the past.
00:45:15Claude Monet settled into Ville d'Avray for the summer of 1866.
00:45:20With him was his young model for woman in the green dress, Camille Dancieux.
00:45:26Only by now, she was more than just his model.
00:45:29She was his mistress.
00:45:39Monet asked Camille to pose for several figures for his next painting, Women in the Garden.
00:45:48He was looking to capture the natural effects of light.
00:45:52And Monet felt that this could only be done outdoors,
00:45:55with his subject before him from the first brush stroke to the last.
00:46:02The practice of painting en plein air, or out of doors, was actually a very old practice.
00:46:08But when Monet decides to paint pictures exclusively out of doors, not touched up in the studio, that was radical.
00:46:30Auguste Renoir, meanwhile, was in Paris, working in a style that was anything but radical.
00:46:37He was making a history painting portraying Diana, the goddess of the moon and hunt.
00:46:45He's still looking to make a name for himself, in some ways in the traditional way.
00:46:50He's still looking to paint on a scale that will be acceptable at the salon.
00:46:56Renoir has no safety net.
00:46:59His parents, who are retired in Lufsiennes, as far as I know, he never asked them for a penny for
00:47:04his art.
00:47:06Late in March of 1867, Renoir and Monet submitted their work to the Salon.
00:47:12And they were both rejected.
00:47:21Nearly a year of planning and work ended in failure.
00:47:28To the Salon jury, their paintings simply were not academic enough.
00:47:34Even Renoir's history painting, Diana, was rejected because it did not have the perfectly blended colors and smooth surface that
00:47:43was demanded by the jury.
00:47:48Without a showing at the Salon, Renoir and Monet had little hope of making any money off their years' work.
00:47:55And Monet desperately needed money.
00:48:00His mistress Camille was pregnant.
00:48:05This time, Monet got lucky.
00:48:07He sold women in the garden for an incredible sum, 2,500 francs.
00:48:13The buyer was his wealthy friend, Frédéric Basile.
00:48:18Basile would pay Monet 50 francs a month out of his allowance.
00:48:23Basile then wrote Monet's father on his friend's behalf, begging him to help his son.
00:48:30But Adolph Monet refused to send any money.
00:48:33Instead, he offered free room and board for his son, but not for Camille.
00:48:40We assume that when Monet had set up with Camille, that there was a problem with the family.
00:48:46That they simply felt that this was a bridge too far.
00:48:50That, okay, what went on in Paris behind closed doors was one thing.
00:48:54But having a mistress and an illegitimate child was something that was really a social stigma.
00:48:59And that this was something that they simply couldn't be seen to be supporting.
00:49:07In June of 1867, Monet accepted his father's offer and returned to his boyhood home on the Normandy coast.
00:49:18Before leaving Camille, he found a medical student who agreed to attend the delivery in exchange for a painting.
00:49:30On August 8th, 1867, Camille gave birth to their baby.
00:49:35A healthy boy she named Jean.
00:49:41Monet could not even afford the train fare to visit his new son.
00:49:48He wrote to Bazille to ask for an advance payment on his purchase of women in the garden.
00:49:54He was desperate to send money to Camille.
00:49:57But Bazille did not reply.
00:50:03August 12th, you've been stubborn about answering me.
00:50:08I sent you letter after letter, rapid post.
00:50:12Nothing got a rise out of you.
00:50:14I've had to ask strangers for loans and subject myself to insults.
00:50:19I'm very angry with you.
00:50:21August 20th.
00:50:22I didn't think you'd abandon me like this.
00:50:23Naturally, I no longer attribute your silence to an oversight.
00:50:26It's very wrong.
00:50:27So I no longer dare believe in your friendship.
00:50:30I'm in greater need than ever.
00:50:33You know why.
00:50:34I'm sick over it.
00:50:36October 14th.
00:50:36If you don't answer me, everything will be finished between us.
00:50:40I didn't think you would abandon me like this.
00:50:42One last time.
00:50:43It really is too bad.
00:50:44I tell you, I'm in desperate stress.
00:50:45I've waited for the postman, and every day, it's the same.
00:50:49It pains me to think of his mother having nothing to eat.
00:50:56I think Monet used Basile as some sort of money purse at various points.
00:51:01But at the same time, Basile at times is very willing to help out when he could.
00:51:06But at times, Monet's constant letters must have been thoroughly aggravating.
00:51:10Early in 1868, Monet sold a still life and was able to rejoin Camille and their baby Jean.
00:51:19They settled at an inn where Monet planned to paint for the spring.
00:51:26But before long, he ran out of money yet again.
00:51:30And the innkeepers ran out of patience.
00:51:34They threw Monet and his little family out into the night without even allowing them to gather their belongings.
00:51:45Monet found lodgings for Camille and Jean, and then set out for Le Havre, where he intended to inquire about
00:51:52a commission.
00:51:55When he stopped to change trains, instead of continuing on to Le Havre, Monet began walking toward the Seine.
00:52:07By the time he arrived at the river, he found himself in such a state of melancholy that he threw
00:52:14himself headlong into the water.
00:52:25Claude Monet was 27 years old when he threw himself into the Seine.
00:52:31He was overwhelmed by debt and gloomy about his future.
00:52:37But he forced himself to swim back to the river's edge and pull himself out.
00:52:47The next day, Monet sat down and scribbled a short note to Bazille.
00:52:54June 29th, 1868.
00:52:58I was certainly born under an unlucky star.
00:53:02My family has no intention of doing anything more for me.
00:53:09I was so upset yesterday that I was stupid enough to hurl myself into the water.
00:53:16Fortunately, no harm came of it.
00:53:20Monet.
00:53:24It was much more likely to be exasperation rather than a serious attempt to end everything.
00:53:30I think there's a sense in which he's always driven and he is somebody who was immensely ambitious.
00:53:37And you feel that there is a real sense of perseverance, of sort of dogged determination to win out in
00:53:42the end.
00:53:46Monet got back on the train and continued on to Le Havre.
00:53:52Once there, he paid a visit to an art collector and won a commission to paint several portraits.
00:54:04To top it off, Monet sold two of his seascapes.
00:54:13After Monet finished work on the portraits that fall, he took Camille and two-year-old Jean and moved to
00:54:20the Paris suburb of Bougival.
00:54:26Nearby lived Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro.
00:54:32Camille Pissarro, like Monet, had been struggling.
00:54:35The 100 francs a month he received from his mother was never enough.
00:54:42Pissarro had to support his mistress, Julie, and their two children.
00:54:51So, Pissarro took work painting canvas window blinds.
00:54:58One of his friends could not resist painting a view of the fine artist reduced to working as an artisan.
00:55:09Monet, though, would not even consider picking up other work to help pay the bills.
00:55:15And as the summer of 1869 progressed without a sale, Monet could hardly afford to buy food for his family.
00:55:24The idea that a painter would wait tables, for example, is really a more modern idea.
00:55:29Most painters in the 19th century, if they were going to be painters, survived on the thinnest of lines economically
00:55:37and may do as best they could.
00:55:39It was a question of devoting yourself utterly to painting and hopefully having some kind of family support.
00:55:48Renoir did his best to help the Monets, bringing leftover food from his parents' house whenever he could.
00:55:55Renoir, though, was himself out of money.
00:55:59My dear Bazille, I'm staying with my parents, and I'm almost always at Monet's.
00:56:06They can't hold out much longer.
00:56:08They don't eat every day.
00:56:11I'm doing almost nothing because I don't have many colors.
00:56:15Things may go better this month.
00:56:17If they go better, I'll write you.
00:56:20Renoir.
00:56:26Meanwhile, Edgar Degas was able to concentrate fully on his art.
00:56:31He did not need to sell.
00:56:34At 35 years old, he still lived on a generous allowance from his father.
00:56:40He kept himself constantly focused on his art.
00:56:45Always striving for perfection.
00:56:48Always pushing to break new ground.
00:56:52He always seems to have been a step ahead of the company in terms of thinking about what was going
00:56:58on.
00:56:59And people became a bit fearful of him for that reason, that he wasn't somebody that you argued with.
00:57:04He would just cut the ground from under your feet.
00:57:08Degas kept himself ahead of the pack by constantly experimenting.
00:57:14He experimented with modern life themes.
00:57:19With the effect of artificial light.
00:57:24And with compositions that gave a sense of capturing a moment in time.
00:57:34But by the late 1860s, Degas could no longer ignore the fact that something was wrong with his eyesight.
00:57:45Bright light pained him.
00:57:48One eye refused to focus.
00:57:53His eye doctor gave him bad news.
00:57:57Degas had an irregular field of vision in his left eye.
00:58:01And in his right eye, almost no vision at all.
00:58:10Degas was thrown into despair, terrified that he was going to be completely blind.
00:58:18His world revolved around his painting.
00:58:23And Degas could not shake the feeling that his world was soon to end.
00:58:40Edgar Degas was just in his thirties when his eyesight began to fail him.
00:58:48He was tormented by the thought that his art career was ending.
00:58:54He begins to worry that he's going to go blind and have periods of depression because, of course, it's the
00:59:00worst possible thing if you're an artist.
00:59:04You can argue that his awareness of his sight problems makes him a more interesting artist and maybe even a
00:59:12better artist because he thought about sight.
00:59:16When you read his notebooks, you get a sense of how he wants to do new things.
00:59:24To see the world at new angles.
00:59:27To look at the city from above, from below.
00:59:31He does this wonderful pastel, I think it is, of a circus performer, suspended from the ceiling, but he gets
00:59:43her from below at a very odd angle.
00:59:46So he really wants to see things new.
00:59:50And I think a certain kind of objective distance.
00:59:55He doesn't want to make things pretty.
01:00:01Because he refused to make things pretty, he almost lost a good friend.
01:00:07On an evening in 1868, Degas visited with Edouard Manet.
01:00:14As always, Degas brought his sketchbook.
01:00:18And when Madame Manet, an accomplished pianist, began to play, Degas began to sketch.
01:00:27Degas returned to his studio to paint the scene.
01:00:30And when he was finished, he gave the work to the Manets as a gift.
01:00:36Edouard Manet took one look at it and suddenly slashed the canvas nearly in half, cutting out the portrait of
01:00:44his wife at the piano.
01:00:47He thought that Degas had made her look ugly.
01:00:53Degas was furious that his painting was ruined.
01:00:57But when a friend later asked if he was still mad at Manet, Degas replied simply,
01:01:03How could anyone stay on bad terms with Manet?
01:01:08Manet was known for being charismatic, urbane, even charming.
01:01:15Degas, on the other hand, was known to be difficult, remote, and overly argumentative.
01:01:21With his fellow male artists, he could be very dismissive and very critical.
01:01:31His relationship with the women artists that he was meeting as a young man are slightly different.
01:01:37He was clearly attracted, for example, to Bette Morisseau, who was a very beautiful young woman.
01:01:43And she moved in a sophisticated, cultured family from society.
01:01:48And he fell a little bit in love with her towards the end of the 1860s.
01:01:53It never came to anything he wasn't at all adept at making love in the 19th century sense.
01:02:02Edma.
01:02:03Monsieur Degas came and sat next to me, pretending he was going to court me.
01:02:08But his courting was confined to a long commentary on Solomon's proverb,
01:02:14Woman is the desolation of the righteous.
01:02:18I certainly do not find his personality attractive.
01:02:22He has wit, but nothing more.
01:02:25Your sister, Bette.
01:02:29Degas was a regular at Madame Morisseau's Tuesday night dinners.
01:02:33And he would become lifelong friends with Bette Morisseau.
01:02:38The Morisseau family was very well connected.
01:02:41And I think this was very important for Bette Morisseau when she was growing up, particularly as a young woman.
01:02:48To have people like Edouard Manet visit the home.
01:02:51To listen to conversation which went beyond the domestic or beyond the local concerns of an upper middle class family.
01:03:06As teenagers in the 1850s, Bette and her older sister Edma learned to paint.
01:03:14Like most other lessons girls of the Morisseau's class received, their painting lessons were simply to allow them to appear
01:03:21well rounded enough to attract a suitable husband.
01:03:25But Bette and Edma took their art seriously.
01:03:31After they'd been painting for only a few years, Madame Morisseau received a disquieting letter from their instructor.
01:03:40With characters like your daughters, my teaching will make them painters, not minor amateur talents.
01:03:47Do you really understand what that means?
01:03:51In the world of the grand bourgeoisie in which you move, it would be a revolution.
01:03:57I would even say a catastrophe.
01:04:02There were so many arguments that to be a woman artist would sap one's femininity, would make it impossible to
01:04:12be married, would make it impossible to be a good mother, would make it impossible even to be a good
01:04:16looking woman.
01:04:17And the biggest problem was that women were officially barred from any number of art institutions.
01:04:28The Morisseau girls were determined to press forward.
01:04:33Madame Morisseau, though, was worried that neither Edma nor Bette were concentrating on the real goal, marriage.
01:04:43In 1868, Edma was 28, Bette 27, and Madame Morisseau felt it was about time they each found a husband.
01:04:55So she paraded suitors through the house.
01:04:59She made comments about her daughter's fading looks.
01:05:03But neither Edma nor Bette showed the slightest interest in marriage.
01:05:11Both girls, it seemed, were infatuated with Edouard Manet.
01:05:17I definitely think he has a charming character, Bette said.
01:05:21He pleases me infinitely.
01:05:26But Manet was already married.
01:05:29Bette called Manet's wife his fat Suzanne.
01:05:39And when Manet accepted a young woman as his student, Bette was instantly jealous.
01:05:51Manet was interested enough in Bette to ask her to pose for him.
01:05:58He was so taken by the dark, intelligent, even mysterious look that Morisseau gave him in The Balcony,
01:06:05that he went on to make 13 more portraits of her.
01:06:08Bette in German.
01:06:12Bette in German.
01:06:13Bette in German.
01:06:32Bette in German.
01:06:38He was so taken and saw a huge picture.
01:06:39But Morisot was never alone with Manet.
01:06:45Through the many sittings, Berthe's mother was a constant chaperone.
01:06:52Madame Morisot was displeased that her daughter was not spending her time more wisely.
01:06:59Berthe Morisot persisted long past the age when she should have given up painting
01:07:04and gotten married according to conventional standards of femininity.
01:07:09And she became a driven artist in a way that alarmed and saddened her mother.
01:07:19Edma, though, succumbed to the pressure, and in March 1869, she married.
01:07:25With Edma gone, Berthe became filled with self-doubt.
01:07:31Morisot was very tough on herself.
01:07:34She was never complacent.
01:07:36She was never satisfied.
01:07:38She was tormented in many ways.
01:07:41Somehow she'd internalised a kind of negative self-image.
01:07:44She wonders often whether she should give it up
01:07:47at the point that her sister marries and has a baby.
01:07:50Morisot herself is tormented and says,
01:07:52Should I give up painting too?
01:07:54Is it worth pursuing? It's such a struggle.
01:08:02Dearest Edma, I'm sad.
01:08:06I feel lonely, disillusioned, and old.
01:08:11I've done absolutely nothing since you left, and this is beginning to distress me.
01:08:18My painting never seemed to me as bad as it has in recent days.
01:08:32Morisot suffered with what she called lamentation mania.
01:08:38For her, there were times when both art and life seemed too much to bear.
01:09:01Berthe Morisot struggled to pull herself from depression.
01:09:07Unmarried at the considerable age of 28, and her art career going nowhere,
01:09:13Morisot felt nothing but anguish.
01:09:22But early in the summer of 1869, she forced herself out of the house for a painting trip.
01:09:33She travelled over 500 kilometres to her sister Edma's house in Lorient,
01:09:38on the coast of Brittany.
01:09:45Once there, she was ready to paint.
01:09:49The trip would mark a new beginning for both Morisot and her art.
01:09:57Morisot was in a mood to experiment.
01:09:59She tried new techniques to portray light and brightness.
01:10:05She adopted a broader brush stroke.
01:10:08And she worked hard to portray a feeling of a moment captured.
01:10:17When she returned to Paris in September,
01:10:20she invited Manet over to see her harbour at Lorient.
01:10:26Manet couldn't quite understand why she'd left it in what he considered an unfinished state.
01:10:33But nonetheless, he liked it.
01:10:37Manet looks at it and says,
01:10:39I'd like to have that painting.
01:10:40And all of a sudden, Morisot thinks,
01:10:44Manet, the great painter of his generation,
01:10:46he wants one of my pictures.
01:10:48And I think that was the moment at which she thinks to herself,
01:10:53yes, I am going to be also a great painter of my generation.
01:11:07Not long after Morisot returned from Lorient,
01:11:11Manet and Renoir were preparing to go on a painting expedition of their own.
01:11:17It had taken them the entire summer to scrape together enough money to buy their painting supplies.
01:11:25Now, in early October, they were ready.
01:11:31They went across the river from Louvassiennes to a nearby swimming area called La Grandouillère,
01:11:38the frog pond.
01:11:40And they began to experiment.
01:11:47Monet and Renoir wanted to capture the shimmer of water,
01:11:52reflection,
01:11:57movement,
01:12:02a fleeting impression.
01:12:10And to do so, they began using short strokes, commas, or dots.
01:12:17They left brush marks distinctly visible.
01:12:20And they paid close attention to the individual highlights of reflected color.
01:12:32Monet's and Renoir's experiments at La Grandouillère marked the debut of the Impressionist style.
01:12:46There are many moments when one might say Impressionism came into this world,
01:12:51kicking, screaming, slightly messy.
01:12:53But, um, certainly in the late 1860s when Monet and Renoir were painting at La Grandouillère,
01:13:04in addition to turning to contemporary life,
01:13:07they wanted to literally be able to heighten the impact of their work through formal means,
01:13:13color, brushwork, novel compositions.
01:13:17And this was an absolutely calculated affair.
01:13:21This idea of capturing the ephemeral,
01:13:25that modernity consists in pinning down what goes by so quickly,
01:13:32that modernity is captured in a minute, a second, a fraction of a second.
01:13:37This was part of the Impressionist impulse.
01:14:04The Impressionist impulse was not just shared by Monet and Renoir,
01:14:09but by Morisot,
01:14:13Sisley,
01:14:15and Pissarro.
01:14:26They were creating art that captured the modern moment.
01:14:31But the art world was not at all prepared for such a break with the past.
01:14:43In the spring of 1870,
01:14:46Claude Monet decided he would challenge the Salon Jury
01:14:49and submit his experimental work from La Grandouillère.
01:14:54Renoir opted to play it safe and chose more conservative paintings,
01:14:59The Bather and A Woman of Algeria.
01:15:02The jury accepted Renoir's work.
01:15:06Monet's was rejected.
01:15:14Monet did his best to put his disappointment and anger aside
01:15:17and focus on his personal life.
01:15:22That spring, he asked Camille to marry him.
01:15:28After nearly four years together, and with a three-year-old son in tow,
01:15:33Camille Doncieux and Claude Monet were married in a small civil ceremony on June 28, 1870.
01:15:43He took Camille and Jean on a working honeymoon to the resort town of Trouville.
01:15:53There, Monet painted his new bride on the beach.
01:16:05Everything seemed bathed in a bright wash of sunlight and air.
01:16:11Monet's paintings reflected none of his worry over money
01:16:15or disappointment over his lack of recognition.
01:16:21Out of his group of artist friends,
01:16:23Monet had been the only one to be refused by the Salon.
01:16:33But he wasn't the only one traumatized by the jury.
01:16:37Morisot was upset by the acceptance of one of her submissions,
01:16:42Portrait of the Artist's Mother and Sister.
01:16:45After completing the painting,
01:16:47Morisot wondered whether it was good enough to go to the Salon.
01:16:51So she asked for Manet's opinion,
01:16:54a request she would immediately regret.
01:16:58Manet said it was fine except the bottom of the dress.
01:17:02He took the brushes, added a few accents that looked quite good.
01:17:06Then began my woes.
01:17:09Once he had started, nothing could stop him.
01:17:12He made a thousand jokes, laughed like a madman, gave me the palette, took it back again,
01:17:18and finally by five in the evening he had made the prettiest caricature possible.
01:17:25People were waiting to take it away.
01:17:27My only hope is to be rejected.
01:17:31Berthe.
01:17:33Morisot was devastated.
01:17:35First of all, she worried that the picture was no longer really hers.
01:17:39But then also, that concern just exacerbated the one she'd had before,
01:17:45which is that she thought it wasn't a good enough picture to go to the Salon.
01:17:49And she wrote to her mother, I'd rather be at the bottom of a river than have that picture shown.
01:17:56But Morisot soon forgave Manet for touching up her work.
01:18:05To Morisot, Edouard Manet was a lifeline to the art world.
01:18:12At her mother's Tuesday night dinners,
01:18:14Morisot was able to get updates on the conversations that took place at the Café Guerbois.
01:18:21Conversations that she, as a proper upper-class woman, was unable to join.
01:18:28One of the things that's very difficult to understand about Morisot is how she could keep
01:18:33a pace with these young men who were having these lively discussions in the Cafés.
01:18:40And so we have to believe that at these family dinner parties,
01:18:46Morisot was, if not showing her pictures to her new friends or looking at their pictures,
01:18:53that at least they were talking about painting and painting theory.
01:18:58And I always imagine this scene where, to the left and to the right, people are talking about the weather,
01:19:04the latest play. And meanwhile, unbeknownst to everyone at the table,
01:19:09Impressionism is happening right there.
01:19:20But Impressionism was suddenly put on hold.
01:19:25On July 19, 1870, the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia.
01:19:36And all of France was thrown into turmoil.
01:19:57On July 19, 1870, the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia, Napoleon III,
01:19:58and the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, declared war on Prussia.
01:20:05Frederick Bazille was one of the first to answer the nationwide call to arms.
01:20:11He could easily have bought himself out of service, but instead, he joined the infantry.
01:20:19As soon as Renoir learned that Bazille enlisted, he fired off a one-line note.
01:20:25Triple shit, he wrote. You are a stark, raving bastard.
01:20:35Bazille was sent to Algeria for combat training.
01:20:38But he seemed to think more about art than war.
01:20:44Dearest mother, I wouldn't be at all disappointed at seeing a real Arab village.
01:20:50I haven't seen a single palm tree.
01:20:54The Arabs are all poor and filthy. However, there's plenty here that would make for really lovely paintings.
01:21:02Frédéric.
01:21:10On September 2, in a battle on the Prussian border, the French army was routed.
01:21:16Emperor Napoleon III was forced to surrender.
01:21:21Napoleon had completely underestimated the strength of the Prussian army.
01:21:32In Paris, a new government quickly formed and sent out a call for all able-bodied men to join the
01:21:39National Guard.
01:21:43The Prussians were marching toward Paris.
01:21:50Monet, not interested in putting himself at risk for Napoleon's folly, got on a boat at Le Havre and fled
01:21:57to London.
01:22:00His wife and son would soon follow.
01:22:05Degas and Manet enlisted.
01:22:07They were both assigned to serve in the Artillery Corps.
01:22:15Renoir was drafted and posted to a regiment of cuirassiers, the armored cavalry.
01:22:26Pissarro and his family were forced to abandon their home to escape the oncoming Prussian troops.
01:22:34They fled to a friend's country house, then made their way on to London to wait out the remainder of
01:22:40the war.
01:22:50Brazil finished his training in Algeria, and by late fall, he joined an infantry regiment near Fontainebleau Forest.
01:22:59He wrote to his parents, trying to calm their fears.
01:23:03I am sure not to get killed, he said, I have too many things to do in this life.
01:23:13Within days of sending the letter,
01:23:15Brazil's regiment was caught by the advancing Prussian, and he found himself in the midst of his first battle.
01:23:28It would be his last.
01:23:33Two bullets ripped through his stomach, and on November 28th, 1870, Frederick Bazille died.
01:23:44He was just 29 years old.
01:23:52The fighting was later described as a minor skirmish.
01:23:57It had no impact on the outcome of the war.
01:24:05Brazil's father spent eight days searching the battlefield for his dead son.
01:24:12Finally, he found him in an unmarked grave and brought him home for a proper burial in Montpellier.
01:24:22When the news reached artists like Monet and Renoir, who were good friends of Bazille's, that he had died,
01:24:30it was a moment of great sadness.
01:24:33He was one of their best friends.
01:24:39He was clearly someone that they had hoped to go forward with after the Franco-Prussian war.
01:24:46He was part of the inner circle.
01:24:48He was a driving force in the Impressionist movement.
01:24:52A quiet, but driving force.
01:24:54And he was suddenly gone.
01:25:23The Prussians surrounded Paris and cut off supplies of firewood and food to the entire city.
01:25:35January, 1871.
01:25:37My dear Edma, we celebrated the birth of the new year in sadness and tears.
01:25:43The bombardment never stops.
01:25:47It is a sound that reverberates in your head night and day.
01:25:52What suffering, what dire need.
01:25:55It is heart-rending.
01:25:58Bert's health is visibly affected.
01:26:01With all my love, your mother.
01:26:09On January 28th, 1871, France surrendered to Prussia, giving up Alsace-Lorraine and paying heavy reparations.
01:26:21But peace was not to last.
01:26:27Civil war broke out in early April.
01:26:31The backers of a left-wing Paris government called the Paris Commune fought street-to-street battles with the national
01:26:38government for control of the city.
01:26:43Before the civil war ended late in May, tens of thousands of Parisians were killed.
01:26:48Many of them over a few days that came to be known as the Semaine Sanglante, the bloody week.
01:26:57Many people were shot very summarily.
01:27:02Many people were exiled.
01:27:04Manet and Degas, according to Bet-Mauriceau's mother, went through Paris at this time, thinking this is the most terrible
01:27:15thing.
01:27:15Manet even drew a picture of one of these summary executions.
01:27:32The sunny, vibrant, modern world that had been laid onto canvas by a handful of young artists seemed lost to
01:27:41cold and darkness and desperation.
01:27:49But out of the darkness would arise a new France and a new sense of opportunity.
01:27:58The small group of Impressionist painters felt the time was right to take on the French art establishment
01:28:06and to challenge the conservative art critics.
01:28:11Their fight was to make art on their own terms.
01:28:17To create art that captured the modern moment.
01:28:23To not only survive, but to succeed.
01:28:27And to triumph.
01:28:47To not only survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:50to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:51to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:51to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:51to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:51to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:51to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:52to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:28:55to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but to do not survive, but
01:29:00to do not survive,
01:29:34Transcription by CastingWords
01:29:35CastingWords
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