The Café Guerbois Circle

By 1866, a remarkable gathering of creative minds had coalesced around the Café Guerbois on the rue des Batignolles in Paris. Every Thursday evening, artists, writers, and critics would crowd into the smoky interior to debate the future of art over coffee and absinthe. At the center of these gatherings sat Édouard Manet, the elegant painter whose "Olympia" and "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" had scandalized the Salon. Though Manet himself never fully embraced the Impressionist aesthetic, preferring the controlled environment of the studio, his bold handling of paint and modern subjects made him a hero to the younger generation.

Claude became a regular at these gatherings, joining Renoir, Bazille, Sisley, and a growing circle that included Edgar Degas, the aristocratic painter of dancers and racehorses; Paul Cézanne, the intense Provençal whose struggles with form would later lead to Cubism; and Camille Pissarro, the eldest of the group and its moral compass. Also present was Berthe Morisot, a talented painter who would become one of the movement's most dedicated practitioners, though as a woman of the upper middle class, she could not frequent the café as regularly as her male colleagues.

The discussions at the Café Guerbois were passionate, sometimes erupting into heated arguments. Émile Zola, the novelist and childhood friend of Cézanne, would defend the new painting with his pen, writing criticism that championed what he called "the actualists"—artists who painted modern life with modern techniques. The photographer Nadar, whose studio would later host the first Impressionist exhibition, brought insights from his own medium about capturing instantaneous effects.

These gatherings were crucial not merely for the exchange of ideas but for the formation of a group identity. The artists encouraged each other to persist in the face of official rejection, shared technical discoveries, and perhaps most importantly, began to envision an alternative to the Salon system that dominated French art.