Monet's flowering poppy fields of Vetheuil, Renoir's glimpses of trees in full leaf with contrasts of orange-blue, red-green and yellow-purple sun-flooded patches; Degas' dancers painted from radical perspectives; Cezanne's dynamic explosions of light that made simple fruits come alive, and Manet's café scenes that served as fascinating windows into the actuality of Parisian social life ... today we admire their brilliance. Their paintings captured the Paris vie insouciante so non-reflective of the world of art in the mid-1800s. Artistic renderings that did not display historical subjects, contain surfaces uniformly worked over with dark, somber colors, reflect the ideals of order and symmetry or obtain a completeness of treatment where even the smallest trifle acquired importance under the artist's brush were simply not pictures at all. The story of how the core Impressionist artists painted their way out of this stagnant, academic quagmire is as fascinating and enlightening as the works they created. In creating fully three-dimensional figures, the lives of Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne are followed simultaneously as this movement unfolds amidst the volatile and changing social and political times and grows from steady rising wave into an unstoppable tsunami.