O Ateliê de Bazille

Bazille finished this view of his own studio in Paris early in 1870, and it is really a group portrait of a friendship. That tall figure at the easel is Bazille himself, so tall he barely fits the room, and he could not quite paint his own likeness, so his friend Édouard Manet stepped in and did it for him. Around them are the others who met here to argue about a new kind of painting, among them Renoir, Monet and the writer Émile Zola on the stairs. Within months that circle scattered. War broke out with Prussia in the summer of 1870, Bazille enlisted, and in November he was killed in action at the age of 28. He never saw the movement his friends would soon be calling Impressionism, and this crowded, cheerful room is one of the last things he left.