Jules-Antoine Castagnary

Jules-Antoine Castagnary (11 April 1830 – 11 May 1888) was a French liberal politician, journalist and progressive and influential art critic, who embraced the new term "Impressionist" in his positive and perceptive review of the first Impressionist show, in Le Siècle, 29 April 1874.

After the collapse of the French Second Empire, Castagnary, who was an anti-clerical republican, developed a secondary political career.

He was appointed to a ministerial post in the short-lived Léon Gambetta cabinet in 1881, but resigned when that ministry fell 1 January 1882.

[3] His portrait by his intimate friend Gustave Courbet (1870), whose art Castagnary championed from the first and whose radical role during the Paris Commune Castagnary defended after Courbet's death,[4] is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

[5] The correspondence between the two men is a fundamental document in analyzing Courbet's life and output.