Musée d'Orsay — Paris, Île-de-France, France

This was one of the first of his rehearsal-room pictures, painted when he'd started getting himself in behind the scenes at the Paris opera house through friends with subscriptions. The building he was working in burned down a few years later, from what I can find, so the room itself is long gone.

One critic at the time is said to have compared her to a balloon perched on a bonbon box — all polish, no real feeling. The French state bought the painting almost immediately anyway, while a very different crowd of painters, working just blocks away, could barely get their work into the same building.

It got turned down by the big official Salon the year he made it, and Émile Zola wrote a defence of him in a newspaper that apparently annoyed enough readers to cost Zola the job. Wikipedia puts the flatness down to Japanese prints and Spanish painting, both of which he'd been looking hard at.

Apparently critics joked at the time that someone should just shut the shutters on this one — it got a rough reception when it first went up.

This one started out with a plainer name — something like 'In a Café' — before the nickname it's known by now took over, from what I can find.

Monet reportedly dug a trench in the garden so he could lower a huge canvas down and keep painting the top half without moving it — his soon-to-be wife modeled for all four women, apparently.

This one sat around unfinished for decades — started in Italy, finished in Paris when he was in his seventies and running the state art school, according to Wikipedia. Two of his students painted the background and the water jar for him, which sounds like cheating until you learn that's just how a big studio worked.

It's his aunt's family, painted during a long stay in Florence. The marriage was, by most accounts, a miserable one, and she's dressed in black because she was mourning her own father — that's supposedly him in the little red drawing on the wall behind her.

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

About as approved-of as painting got at the time — the emperor apparently bought it straight off the Salon wall. Two years later Manet showed a nude in a not-so-different pose and Paris was outraged, which suggests the rule was never really about bare skin, but about who was allowed to be bare.

They've stopped for the evening prayer — the bell would be ringing from that little church on the horizon. Dalí was supposedly obsessed with this picture, insisting the couple were actually mourning a dead child, and an X-ray later turned up a painted-over shape near the basket. No one seems to agree what it was.

He was on a run of night pictures around this time, and wrote to his brother about wanting to do darkness in colour instead of black — that's the bit I keep seeing quoted, anyway. The spot was supposedly a two-minute walk from the house he was renting.

The official Salon rejected this, so it went into the side exhibition of rejects the emperor allowed that year, where crowds supposedly turned up mainly to laugh at it. It started out with a much duller title, something like 'The Bath', and the arrangement of the three of them is said to be lifted from a centuries-old engraving — which may have been part of the cheek.

This stretch of the Seine just outside Paris was where he lived for years — a town people came out to from the city by train to mess about in boats. He painted that same water over and over, and had a boat rigged up as a floating studio to do it from, apparently.

It was painted the year Paris fell to the Prussians, and from what I've read it's one of a small set he made about that war — the smoking city in the background is meant to be Paris itself. Why there's a sphinx in the middle of it, no one seems to agree; even the title just shrugs.

Gleaning was, apparently, a legal right for the poorest people in a village — once the harvest was carted off you could go over the field and keep whatever was left. Well-off critics at the time took badly to seeing that painted this big, and read three women picking up scraps as a political argument rather than a scene.

The woman here is apparently Morisot's own sister, watching her new baby — this was one of the pieces Morisot showed at the very first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and from what I can find it barely sold at the time.

The man leaning on the cane is Jules Perrot, a real ballet master — apparently Degas painted him well after actually watching him teach a class like this one. The whole scene was reportedly commissioned by a composer, Jean-Baptiste Faure, not a museum.

The row, from what I've read, was about the size. A canvas this wide was for battles and saints, and he used one on a burial in the small town he came from, with half the place turning out for it. When it went on show in Paris it caused an uproar and made his name in one go.