Charles Gleyre

In the winter of 1863, four young men shared an easel-crowded studio on Paris's Left Bank under a Swiss painter most people have since forgotten. Their teacher was Charles Gleyre, and the pupils were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille, the core of what would soon be called Impressionism.

Gleyre himself painted nothing like what they went on to do. He was a careful academic who had spent years traveling in Egypt and the Near East, work that ruined part of his eyesight, and he built his name on polished classical scenes such as Les Illusions Perdues, an aging poet watching his dreams drift away on a boat. He charged his students almost nothing, ran the studio on republican principle, and let them paint outdoors when the fashion was to stay in.

When illness and money troubles forced him to close the atelier in 1864, the young painters scattered to the fields around Paris. Gleyre kept working quietly until his death in 1874, the year his former pupils held the first Impressionist exhibition.