Its teachers included artists who were great, though not progressive. Thomas Couture conveyed a preference for contemporary subjects to student Edouard Manet. Charles Gleyre clung to the past in his own work but encouraged the freedom of expression that enabled students Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Auguste Renoir to set modern art on a new course. The impressionists recorded the world around them in a century of great change. Manet, in The Cafe-Concert, paints a favorite and familiar Montmartre subject.
Viewers understand perspective by each figure's size, overlapping, placement and intensity of color.
The show is heavy in rural landscapes, crossing many stylistic interpretations. Several works by members of the Barbizon school, including Corot, Theodore Rousseau and Jean-Francois Millet, present romantic visions of life away from urban cares. Both works are scenes along the Thames, reminiscent of Houses of Parliament at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts. All three works have holding power, though the St. Petersburg museum's work, perhaps because of its distinctive subject matter, has more flair. Impressionist compositions had a fuzzy formlessness that soon metamorphosed into post-impressionism, expressed by Paul Cezanne, often considered the father of modern art, as well as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Georges Seurat.