The exhibition was held in April 1874 at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, the studio of the famous photographer Nadar.

In mid-19th century France, artists depended on public exhibitions to connect them with patrons willing to buy their artworks.

Following the revolution and the abolishment of the Royal Academy in 1791, non-member artists were permitted to exhibit artworks in the Salon.

With the exception of a short period of a few years following the French Revolution of 1848, the artworks displayed at the Salon were chosen by a jury consisting of members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

[1] Being accepted to the Salon was vital for artists because the jury's decision affected the public's perception of artworks.

[4] After hearing about the controversy, Emperor Napoleon III visited Palais de l'Industrie where the Salon was to be held and consulted with the president of the jury.

[5] The artwork to attract the most visitors at the Salon des Refusés was the painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet.

[9][10] The scandal surrounding Édouard Manet and the Salon des Refusés brought several younger artists into his social circle.

[11] Manet was a frequent visitor at the Café Guerbois, located at 11 Grande rue des Batignolles in Paris.

Some of the artists that regularly visited the café were Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cézanne.

Cézanne, on the other hand, believed that they should always submit their most "offensive" pictures to the Salon as a means of challenging established customs.

[14] Despite their differing views, the members of the Batignolles group regularly submitted their artworks to that annual Salon.

[15] Claude Monet and Frédéric Bazille first proposed that the Batignolles group hold their own exhibition at their own expense in 1867.

Bazille, who had died in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, did not live to participate in the exhibition that he and Monet had once envisioned.

[21] For the location of the group exhibition, Manet suggest the studio of the photographer Félix Nadar at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, which was sometimes rented out for concerts or lectures.

The initial signers of the charter were Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Pissarro, Béliard, Guillaumin, Lepic, Levert, and Rouart.

[23][26] In the end, the members of group settled on the name Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs, graveurs, etc.

[30] On April 25, the satirical magazine Le Charivari published a review of the exhibition by Louis Leroy titled "L'Exposition des impressionnistes".

[b] The satirical review was written in the form of a dialog between Leroy and a fictional[31] academic landscape painter named Joseph Vincent.

Vincent repeatedly mocks Leroy's use of the word "impression", and begins to refer to the artists collectively as "impressionists".

When Vincent finally reaches Cézanne's A Modern Olympia, he is driven mad at its sight and begins to hallucinate that the paintings are talking to him.

"[28] Critics had sometimes previously used the term "impression" in reference to the landscape paintings of Camille Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, and Johan Jongkind.