IMPRESSIONISM BEGAN IN REVOLT. Against the restrictive system of artistic training, the group embraced art-school dropouts. Against biased selection committees, they opened their ranks to all. Against hierarchical display conventions, they assigned wall space by lots. And so, in December 1873, they formed a société anonyme, a joint stock company. The artists based its charter on that of a bakers’ union and pledged to finance “the organization of free exhibitions, without a jury or honorific prizes, where each one of the associates can show his works.”4 Having no positive doctrine, their society encompassed an unusually broad range of techniques and temperaments, frustrating attempts––then and now––to define the movement stylistically. Monet preferred landscapes, Morisot figures. Renoir painted thinly, Cézanne thickly. Pissarro worked from life, Degas from memory. Besides these now-famous names, the initial group had twenty-six additional participants, including some real oddballs. Visitors to the first exhibition would find not only Degas dancers and Morisot interiors, but also engraved copies after Holbein and Rubens by Félix Bracquemond, reduced-size bronzes of nymphs and fauns by Auguste-Louis-Marie Ottin, and Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic’s cartoony portrait of a dog named César.