This book provides an insight into the lives of the men and women who forged the Impressionist movement. A combination of text and paintings reveals the painters' creative energy and determination as they searched for new and revolutionary ways of recording the world around them on to canvas. From the early, student beginnings to the days of acknowledged success, the book illustrates how personalities as diverse as Degas, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro worked together, fought, struggled and argued about their art and their livelihoods.