Return to Paris and Artistic Networks

Back in Paris in 1862, Claude enrolled in the studio of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss academic painter known for his relatively liberal teaching methods. While Gleyre emphasized drawing and classical composition—foundations that would prove valuable even to an artist who would later break radically with tradition—he also allowed his students considerable freedom to develop their own styles.

It was in Gleyre's studio that Claude met the artists who would become his closest companions and fellow revolutionaries: Frédéric Bazille, a tall, wealthy southerner with a generous spirit; Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a porcelain painter's son with an infectious enthusiasm for life; and Alfred Sisley, a reserved Englishman with a poet's sensitivity to landscape. These four young men, united by their dissatisfaction with academic conventions and their desire to paint modern life in a modern way, would form the core of what would later be known as the Impressionist group.

The friendships forged in Gleyre's studio went beyond mere camaraderie. These young artists shared ideas, posed for each other, painted side by side, and perhaps most importantly, reinforced each other's conviction that art needed to break free from the dusty conventions of the academy. They spent hours in the Louvre, but not copying old masters in the approved manner—instead, they studied how Velázquez captured light, how Delacroix used color, how the Dutch masters rendered atmosphere.