12 Amazing Impressionist Facts to Drop at Your Next Dinner
Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir & Fantin-Latour. A collection of 12 surprising anecdotes and hidden secrets about the Impressionists.
[ FUN FACT #1]
🎨 Monet’s The Magpie was rejected by the 1869 Paris Salon for its innovative style. This rejection led Monet to organize impressionist exhibitions. It’s now considered a masterpiece of early Impressionism.a
[ FUN FACT #2]
🎹 Manet’s father hired Suzanne Leenhoff to teach his sons piano. In 1852, she gave birth to a boy named Léon. She told everyone he was her younger brother. For eleven years, the lie held. Léon was actually Manet’s son. His father, a stern judge, never discovered the truth. One year after his father died, Manet finally married Suzanne.
[ FUN FACT #3]
💪 When the Salon rejected his Floor Scrapers in 1875 as vulgar, Caillebotte didn’t apologize. He painted a completely different second version. Then hung both at the 1876 Impressionist exhibition, side by side.
[ FUN FACT #4]
🌸 Fantin Latour was the Victorian master of delicate flower paintings. After his death in 1904, his estate revealed a shocking secret: over 1,400 erotic photographs hidden away. This genteel artist known for roses was actually one of history’s most prolific collectors of pornographic imagery.
[ FUN FACT #5]
🖼️ Émile Bernard had the strangest artistic ritual in history. For 55 consecutive years (1886 to 1941), he painted exactly one self portrait annually, never missing a single year. This obsessive documentation created the most compulsive autobiography ever put to canvas.
[ FUN FACT #6]
💰 The Caillebotte family made millions selling canvas cots and bedding to the French army. When everyone mocked Monet and Renoir as talentless frauds, Gustave used his war fortune to buy their paintings year after year, pay their rent, and fund their supplies. Army money kept Impressionism alive when the entire art world wanted it dead.
[ FUN FACT #7]
💔 In 1869, Manet met Eva Gonzalès and made her his only student. For fourteen years, she worked in his studio. In April 1883, she gave birth. A few days later, still weak in bed, someone told her Manet had died.
The shock was terrible. On the morning of his funeral, she sat up making flower crowns for his grave. That night she collapsed. The doctors said embolism. She died six days after him. She was 34.
[ FUN FACT #8]
👶 When Renoir's son Jacques was born, he chose Caillebotte as godfather. When Pissarro had Paul Émile, he chose Monet. The Impressionists didn't just paint together, they raised their children together, trusting each other with the most sacred role in a family when the rest of the world called them failures.
[ FUN FACT #9]
🏥 In his final months, syphilis destroyed Manet’s body. Doctors amputated his left leg to stop the gangrene spreading. When Claude Monet came to visit, he sat down on the hospital bed. Manet suddenly screamed. Monet jumped up, horrified he’d hurt his friend. He had sat on Manet’s leg. The leg that was no longer there.
[ FUN FACT #10]
💔 Alfred Sisley died penniless in 1899 and made a final request to his friend Claude Monet. He entrusted Monet with the care of his children Pierre and Jeanne, and Monet honored this deathbed promise by organizing an auction of Sisley’s works to fund their future. The ultimate act of artistic brotherhood.
[ FUN FACT #11]
⚔️ In 1870, France declared war on Prussia. Bazille was painting in Paris with Monet and Renoir. He enlisted in an elite infantry regiment against his family’s wishes. Three months later, at the battle of Beaune la Rolande, French troops advanced on German positions.
Women and children were running to shelter. Bazille saw soldiers about to fire. He screamed to hold their fire, then ran forward to shield the civilians. He was hit twice. As he died, he gave his ring to a fellow soldier for his parents. It was his first combat.
[ FUN FACT #12]
🔥 Cassatt and Degas met in 1877. He invited her to join the Impressionists. For forty years, they were inseparable. They painted together, fought, reconciled. When Degas died in 1917, Cassatt was 73.
She sat by the fire and gathered every letter he had written to her over four decades. One by one, she fed them to the flames. We will never know what was between them.
I love the Impressionists and thought I knew everything about them. I was wrong
Cassatt and Degas: This has haunted me for years. It is an ache in my heart.