He was among the starving artists who lived la vie de bohéme in Paris in the 1840s, as popularized by his friend and fellow Bohemian, the novelist Henri Murger.

He has been called the "great-grandfather of the Impressionists,"[1] but Chintreuil himself was never part of a movement, and his paintings, especially the major works from the last decade of his life, remain difficult for critics and art historians to classify.

[3] The height of his fame came in the years immediately after his death from tuberculosis in 1873, when his life-partner and fellow artist Jean Desbrosses promoted his legacy with a major book and exhibition in Paris.

[7] Chintreuil then found employment at a bookshop, where he became friends with a fellow employee, Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, who was later to become famous writing under the byline Champfleury.

When not at the bookshop, Chintreuil spent his spare time studying paintings in museums and galleries, or commiserating with Bohemian friends at cafes and in threadbare studio apartments; these were inevitably on the top floor of a building, where rooms were cheapest.

His equally impoverished circle became known as the Buveurs d'Eau, or Water-Drinkers, because at cafes they would occupy a room, pay for one glass of wine between them, and then drink only water.

"[12] Chrintreuil was "a puny-looking, timid, somewhat awkward figure, silently puffing smoke from a long pipe,"[13] wearing his "faithful red jacket.

One anecdote relates how the Water-Drinkers pooled their scanty resources to set up an emergency fund.At one meeting of the Water-Drinkers…with Murger acting as secretary…Chintreuil asked for forty francs with which to buy some cadmium.

[15]So dire were circumstances that Chintreuil and his friends literally became starving artists and were admitted to hospital suffering the effects of malnutrition and exposure in drafty, often unheated quarters.

The death from tuberculosis of Chintreuil's dear friend Joseph Desbrosses in 1844, at the age of 24, inspired the chapter "Manchon du Francine" in Murger's novel.

[22] In 1845,[6] Chintreuil found a patron in the famous poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger, who not only bought paintings from the younger man and paid for his art supplies, but wrote many letters of recommendation to collectors and connoisseurs.

[27] At the age of fourteen, Jean decided to emulate his brothers and live an artist's life, which infuriated his father, who had seen one son die and another become destitute after making the same choice.

"[31] Taking excursions to the outskirts of Paris and beyond, the two became enchanted by the landscape around the village of Igny, "with its fresh meadows, its wooded hillsides, its lazy little river, and its quivering curtains of poplars.

Their friend and biographer Frédéric Henriet [fr] later described them as Robinson Crusoe and Friday, adventurously living by their wits not on a desert island but in the middle of France.

Doctors blamed his illness on exposure to the chilly morning dew and evening mists of the Bièvre River valley, which he braved to paint the fleeting atmospheric effects of dawn and twilight.

From 1857, while keeping a studio in Paris, Chintreuil and Desbrosses decided to spend much of their time in the hamlet of La Tournelle in Septeuil, on a plateau overlooking the Vaucouleurs valley.

They also purchased a garden plot and a ramshackle house, where they set about plugging the holes and adding a second floor, neglecting, "like Balzac at the Maison des Jardies [fr]," to leave room for stairs.

"[39] Accompanied by Desbrosses and engaged with the land as a gardener, haymaker, and painter of nature, it was at La Tournelle that Chintreuil would spend "the sweetest sixteen years of his life,"[37] which would also be his last.

"[41] She is thought to be the subject of Desbrosses' painting at the Musée d'Orsay that depicts a woman seated in the garden at La Tournelle, her face in profile.

"[45] Chintreuil's career continued on a steady course, with more paintings purchased by the French State and by collectors including Alexandre Dumas fils,[46] but in 1863 his entries were all rejected by the jury of the Paris Salon.

In response to Un pré; le soleil chasse le brouillard (A Meadow: Sun Drives Away the Fog) at the Salon of 1864, the critic Léon Lagrange begrudgingly discerned a premonition of things to come (with a knowing nod to Chintreuil's Bohemian past):Once upon a time the Prix de Rome imposed on contestants a subject such as "Hercules driving out the Erymanthian boar."

The worst is that M. Chintreuil manages to interest me in these dramas; his meadow is dripping with moisture, his valley suffocates in the shadows; but through the mists of this new Wagner, I see the landscape of the future dawning.…instead of The Passage of the Red Sea, the "passage from dawn to day"…[50]The painting l'Ondée (The Rain Shower) at the Salon of 1868 marked a definitive triumph for Chintreuil, "a truly great success, that put him at a level unparalleled and guaranteed his work would bring big prices.

"[51] More triumphs were to come, including L'Espace (Space) in 1869, Pommiers et genêts en fleurs (Apple Trees and Broom in Bloom) in 1872, and in 1873, his final painting and "one of his finest productions,"[51] Pluie et soleil (Rain and Sun).

"When he succeeds he expands the horizons of landscape painting," wrote La Fizelière, "and no one has risen higher than he did in the magical effect of Pluie et soleil…where he shows himself in the fullness of his means of expression.

As his condition worsened, his friend and doctor Aimé Martin advised a stay at one of the spas at Eaux-Bonnes, but the long trip exhausted him and he began to run a high fever.

"This return was for Chintreuil a long torture and for Desbrosses a veritable Way of the Cross; he saw to everything, anticipated everything; always attentive and always smiling, he triumphed over all the ill will and indifference of hoteliers on the route.

Henriet believed that Chintreuil "exhaled his last breath in this heartbreaking elegy which, in the form of a struggle between the opposing forces of nature, sings the eternal duality of the human soul, whose brief joys are so quickly crossed by sorrow.

In 1905, Georges Lanoë-Villène called Chintreuil the "great-grandfather of the Impressionists",[1] but the art critic John House, writing a century later, would argue that Chintreuil's interests, as seen in the "very ambitious large-scale landscapes" of his final years,are at the opposite end of the spectrum from the early work of the Impressionists, who in the same years were beginning to explore a calculatedly informal, seemingly casual vision of everyday light and weather.

He was exploring this vision in the 1860s and early 1870s, seeking to take landscape painting in a very different direction from the "realist" and "naturalist" tendencies that were dominant in those years, and to use it as a vehicle for heightened poetic expression.

"[68] More recently, in 2017, the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Meudon [fr] organized a show entitled Antoine Chintreuil (1814-1873): Rêveries d'un paysagiste solitaire.