rts by a number of collectors. The rulers of France had little cultivation in the arts, and their taste and the taste of the public was instead formed by the board of judges of the official Salon. The artists of Montmartre rebelled against this system and chose to be isolated, far from the Salon. They asserted their independence in various ways, from the way they dressed to their art itself. They painted in a new way, a way not accepted by the Salon in any case.
Claude Monet was one of the true Montmartre bohemians. He was the son of a small grocer in Le Havre and was very poor, helped by Manet and Renoir to buy paints and eat. His pictures were rejected year after year by the Salon. His young wife died of malnutrition. His artistic spirit, however, never waned, and the new vision of light articulated by Manet consumed him. During the Franco-Prussian war, at a time when Paris was under siege from Germany, Monet escaped to England. There he came into contact with the paintings of Turner and learned about the use of light by that artist. Monet had much in common with Turner: "They saw the world with a fresh eye, and both were conscious of the modernity of that world. To show the airy light in steam turner had painted an English railroad station, and for the same reason Monet painted Gare St. Lazare, the railroad station in Paris. Before them no one would have dreamed of putting anything so unr
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