The Impressionists' first exhibition in Paris in 1874 triggered a revolutionary change in art history. The rupture they imposed in the second half of the 19th century was as important as that effected by the Italian artists of the Renaissance in the 16th century.

The secular system of fine art was called into question, and the rules of academic painting in force in 19th-century France were challenged.

They left the studio. Historical subjects were abandoned in favor of immediate and modern life representations, and painting asserted its materiality.

As revolutionary as Impressionism was, its artists owed a great deal to their predecessors, mentors to the Impressionists: the defenders of a new painting style.

Delacroix, champion of color, freed painting from the primacy of drawing; the Barbizon painters reinvented landscape painting in France, inaugurating plein-air painting, and the realists led by Courbet and Manet.

This visit, led by art historian Anne Catherine Abecassis, will be an opportunity to discover how these artists paved the road for Impressionism and to observe the shift from academic painting to the new art form.

All invitations are personal and non-transferable.

Image: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Jeunes Grecs faisant battre des coqs, 1846 © Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt