Birth of a movement Paris show recreates historic meeting of impressionist artists

In a luxurious photographer's studio in northern Paris, Pierre auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas are adding the final touches to the hanging of their paintings, while fellow artists Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro lament the lack of recognition for their work and Claude Monet bemoans being mistaken for Édouard Manet.

- Kim Willsher

Outside, Parisian gentlemen in top hats and ladies in bustles are admiring the newly completed Opera House or enjoying an early evening drink on the cafe terraces while horse-drawn carriages clatter down Baron Haussmann's new grand boulevards.

The Musée d'Orsay's Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism, which opens this week, will take visitors on a virtual voyage to the very moment 150 years ago that marked the birth of the movement that changed the history of art. When the 30 artists now known as the impressionists gathered at the studio of the photographer Félix Nadar on the evening of 15 April 1874, they were largely unknown and struggling. Many had been shunned by the jury for the annual salon of the Académie des BeauxArts, the official arbiters of artistic merit, and had decided - almost in desperation - to open their own independent exhibition.