one of the true Montmartre bohemians. He was the son of a small grocer in Le Havre and was very poor, helped by Manet and Renoir to buy paints and eat. His pictures were rejected year after year by the Salon. His young wife died of malnutrition. His artistic spirit, however, never waned, and the new vision of light articulated by Manet consumed him. During the Franco-Prussian war, at a time when Paris was under siege from Germany, Monet escaped to England. There he came into contact with the paintings of Turner and learned about the use of light by that artist.
When Monet returned to Paris, he persuaded his friends in Montmartre to have a Group exhibition of their own, and finally thirty painters assembled 165 pictures of their own and hung them in the study of a photographer na
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