This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every account of Impressionism begins, sooner or later, with a painter who never called himself one. Edouard Manet was already in his thirties and already notorious when the artists who would become the Impressionists were still students, and the scandal he caused a decade before their first group show did more to make that show possible than anything the group itself painted. In 1863, a jury rejected his Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe from the official Paris Salon, and it was shown instead at the Emperor-sanctioned Salon des Refuses, the exhibition of rejects, where a nude woman picnicking among two fully dressed men became the scandal of the season. Two years later Olympia, a frank, direct-gazing depiction of a nude courtesan, provoked outrage severe enough that the Salon stationed guards to keep visitors from damaging the canvas. Manet had, without setting out to found anything, demonstrated that modern Parisian life and the human body could be painted with a bluntness the academic tradition did not allow, and a circle of younger painters, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Bazille, gathered around him at the Cafe Guerbois, treating him as their reference point even before any of them had a name for what they were doing. What makes Manet's position genuinely strange, and not just a footnote, is that when his admirers organized their first independent exhibition in 1874, breaking entirely from the Salon system he had spent his whole career trying to succeed within, he declined to join them. He kept submitting to the official Salon for the rest of his career, accepted and rejected in turns, chasing establishment recognition even as the group he had inspired built an alternative to it. The National Gallery of Art's own assessment of him is direct on this point: he did not share the Impressionists' spontaneity, and his major works came from a deliberate studio process of drawing, models and composition rather than the rapid outdoor observation that defined the group's working method, even after he loosened his brushwork and lightened his palette painting alongside Monet's circle at Argenteuil in the mid-1870s. The result is a classification problem the atlas records honestly rather than resolving by fiat: Manet is Impressionism's essential precursor and the figure the movement could not have happened without, but by his own repeated choice, never one of its members. Art historian T. J. Clark's influential study of Manet reads this refusal as consistent with a wider argument, that the paintings are best understood through the social and political dislocations of modern Paris rather than folded into a single stylistic project with the painters who followed him, a social-historical reading that has itself become a point of scholarly contention against more formalist accounts of his relationship to the group he shaped and declined to join.