As the century began, the academic style favored by the administrator Salon still dictated the success of artists and public taste. But soon that began to change. Realists turned gathering on its head to give heroic character to everyday subjects. Manet scandalized the public with his images of current life. Impressionists tried to capture fleeting special effects of light and atmosphere.

Painting in the first half of the nineteenth century was dominated by Ingres and Delacroix, the first continuing in the neoclassical convention in his emphasis on linear purity and the second championing the expressive, romantic use of color as different to line. Both significantly influenced a new creation of painters who required communicating their own personal responses to the political upheavals of their time.

For two hundred years, the Academy, the School of Fine Arts, and the Salon, the official exhibition, had fostered the French national artistic convention. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the educational system had degenerated.

During the 1860s and 1870s, the artists who later became called as the impressionists concluded that the smoothly idealized presentation of academic art was formulaic and artificial. Their relatively loose, open brushwork underscored their freedom from the scrupulously detailed academic manner. They were innovative in their subject matter, too, choosing motifs that did not educate or preach, such as countryside or ordinary activities of daily life, which were considered trivial or degenerate by the Academy. Often juries, dominated by academic attitudes, rejected the young artists' paintings altogether.

These artists thought that if their work was exhibited fairly, it would expand acceptance. They sought favorable viewing situation such as good lighting and ample space between paintings, and they also required to exhibit more works than the two allowed by Salon rules. In 1874, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Degas, Morisot, and Sisley led a number of friends to form an organization and publicly presented the first group exhibition independent of the official Salon. They known as themselves "Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc., Inc." to avoid expressive titles and pejorative epithets. Critics noted their unconventional style and particularly a work exhibited by Monet with the title Impression, Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris) and sardonically dubbed them "impressionists." The group, which offered eight exhibitions in all, survived until 1886. By then the core impressionists were beginning to attain a degree of admired success. The exhibition strategy that had been necessary to their enterprise was no longer necessary, and the group disbanded.