Monet: "Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment!

This was clearly reflected in a letter that he wrote to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1908, when he was still occupied with the same theme:

'You must know I'm entirely absorbed in my work. These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. It's quite beyond my powers at my age, and yet I want to succeed in expressing what I feel. I've destroyed some... I start others... and I hope that something will come out of so much effort'.

Narcisse Diaz de la Peña | The Barbizon school of painters

Narcisse-Virgilio Díaz de la Peña (1808-1876) was born in 1808 in Bordeaux, of Spanish parents who had fled the Peninsular Wars.

After their early deaths, he grew up in foster care at Meudon.

At thirteen, an infection, caused by an insect sting or snake bite, necessitated the amputation of his left leg.

In 1823 he began an apprenticeship in painting on porcelain at a china factory in Paris, where he met Jules Dupré (1811-1889), who was to become his lifelong friend.

Théodore Rousseau | The Barbizon school of painters

Théodore Rousseau, in full Pierre-Étienne-Théodore Rousseau (born April 15, 1812, Paris, France-died December 22, 1867, Barbizon), French painter who was a leader of the Barbizon school of landscape painters.

His direct observation of nature made him an important figure in the development of Landscape painting.

Rousseau, the son of a tailor, began to paint at age 14.

Attilio Pratella | Landscape/Genre painter

Italian painter Attilio Pratella was born in Lugo, Italy in 1856, and died in Naples in 1949. Pratella began drawing in 1877, was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna through a scholarship and was inspired by the works of Fontanesi. By 1880 attended the Fine Arts Institute in Naples, during which time he earned livelihood as a ceramics decorator in the Cacciapuoti factory.

Théodore Ralli | Orientalist Academic painter

From a well-known family of Chios, Greek painter Théodore Ralli or Theodoros Rallis / Θεόδωρος Ράλλης (1852-1909) worked for a brief period in the commercial house of Rallis-Mavroyannis in London, but abandoned his entrepreneurial career and settled permanently in Paris, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

There he studied painting under the Academic teacher and Orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerome until approximately 1880.

In 1873 he took part in the Salon des Refuses.