‘It makes me sick!’ How the French impressionists went from ‘lunatics’ to luminaries

The National Gallery of Victoria’s new show, French Impressionism, celebrates the likes of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Morisot and Pissarro, who painted in the face of public outrageGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email“Five or six lunatics deranged by ambition – one of them a woman – have chosen to exhibit their works,” the French critic Albert Wolff wrote in a review of an art exhibition in Paris in 1876. The lunatics in question were a group of up-and-coming arti