Manet is friendly with Monet and the others, but despite the insistence of Monet and Degas he does not participate in their independent exhibition.

Hoping for academic success, he continues to submit his paintings to the Salon, which accepts his painting set in the Gare Saint-Lazare, The Railway (1873; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), influenced by the Impressionist palette.

However, the Salon rejects his two other submissions, The Artist (Portrait of Marcellin Desboutin) and The Laundress.

In the last few months of 1874, Manet's friend Stéphane Mallarmé, schoolteacher and leading Symbolist poet, edits a magazine in which he protests the Salon's rejection of Manet's paintings.

Jules Bastien-Lepage, a French painter of rustic outdoor scenes who studied under Alexandre Cabanel, had first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1870; he wins a medal at the Salon of 1874 for Spring Song, which stylistically owes a little to Manet.

Mary Cassatt, a regular Salon exhibitor who shares with the Impressionists an interest in experiment and in using bright colors inspired by the out-of-doors, in this year chooses Paris as her permanent residence and establishes her studio here.

Jules Bastien-Lepage's Les Foins (Hay-making) follows in the tradition of Jean-François Millet and reveals the sentimental element that characterizes his work.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints Mme. Charpentier and Her Children (1878), exhibits The Cup of Chocolate at the Salon, and sells three paintings at low prices at the Hoschedé auction.

Auguste Rodin explores his personal style in St. Jean-Baptiste prôchant (St. John the Baptist Preaching, 1878; Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

Camille Pissarro rents a room in Montmartre to show paintings to collectors, and begins to paint fans.

He meets the Florentine critic Diego Martelli.

Édouard Manet follows Nana and The Plum with The Blonde with Bare Breasts (1878, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), in which his subject's pearl-white flesh tones gleam with light.

He plans a private exhibition rather than submit to the jury of the World's Fair to be held that year, but it never materializes.

Manet's paintings do badly at auctions of the Faure and Hoschedé collections.

He becomes an uncle when Morisot gives birth to her daughter Julie Manet.

Jules Bastien-Lepage represents Joan of Arc as a Lorraine peasant, which typifies his subject pictures. in Joan of Arc Listening to the Voices (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City).

L. Birge Harrison had exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1881, and in 1882 his Salon entry, Novembre, becomes one of the first paintings by an American artist to be purchased by the French government.

The paintings of this period include peasant subjects that show the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

The limited palette and wistful mood of the early works will continue to be distinguishing features of Harrison's later landscape paintings.

Born in Philadelphia, Birge Harrison is the brother of artist T. Alexander Harrison.

He had studied first at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1874, and will later credit Thomas Eakins as a positive influence on his own teaching style.

He has come to Paris on the advice of John Singer Sargent to study with Carolus-Duran and at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel.

Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose health had begun to fail the previous year, dies in Paris on December 10, 1884 at age thirty-six.