“If we manage to move just a few thousand people, it will be an achievement.” So said the artist Camille Pissarro in April 1874, on the eve of the opening in Paris of an exhibition of works by artists rejected by the city’s arts establishment — its Salon — who were painting in a new, daring, more naturalistic manner, with rougher brush-strokes and on canvases often painted outdoors. The show wasn’t in a conventional gallery, but in a photographer’s studio. It was organised and funded by the artists themselves, who had formed a co-operative.
The exhibition failed, in that hardly any of the paintings were sold, and the next year the co-operative folded. And yet Pissarro and his mates — Degas, Renoir, Monet, Morisot, Cezanne
