Batignolles group
also: Groupe des Batignolles
The Batignolles group was the circle of young avant-garde painters who gathered around Edouard Manet in the Batignolles district of Paris in the late 1860s and 1870s. Manet's success at the 1861 Salon made him the magnet for a generation - Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille, Camille Pissarro, Paul Cezanne, Berthe Morisot, and Edgar Degas among them - who met at the Cafe Guerbois to argue out an alternative to the conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts and its control of the Salon. Wartime scattered them in 1870; regrouping, they founded the Societe anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs in 1873 and staged their first independent exhibition in 1874, where Monet's Impression, Sunrise gave Impressionism its name.
Defining characteristics
- Loose, visible brushwork and a brighter palette than academic painting
- Contemporary Parisian subjects: studios, boulevards, cafes, gardens
- En plein-air studies of light and atmosphere made from direct observation
- Cropped, informal compositions that feel caught from life
- Sketch-like surfaces that keep the act of painting visible
Key figures
- Édouard Manet (1832-1883) — Intellectual leader of the circle and bridge from Realism to Impressionism
- Claude Monet (1840-1926) — Nucleus of the group; his Impression, Sunrise named the movement
- Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) — Only woman in the group's core nine
- Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) — Nucleus member killed in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870
Example works
- A Studio at Les Batignolles — Henri Fantin-Latour (1870)
- Impression, Sunrise — Claude Monet (1872)
- The Spanish Singer — Édouard Manet (1860)
Sources
- Batignolles group - Wikipedia encyclopedia