Re-creating the founding of the Impressionist movement, when artists including Monet, Renoir and Cézanne showed their work at their own exhibition

It’s back to the tried and trusted blockbuster names of French impressionism for the latest release from Exhibition on Screen, the Brighton-based outfit demonstrating remarkable staying power in the gallery-film sector; their consistent level of excellence means they remain largely unchallenged in the field. Excursions into the comparatively offbeat – Japanese contemporary art, Edward Hopper, Lucian Freud – are balanced by home bankers, of which this account of the original impressionist exhibition in 1874, must be counted.

The film takes its cue from a show jointly mounted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (where it was called Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment) and Paris’s Musée d’Orsay (Paris 1874: Inventing impressionism). Both exhibitions, and the film, re-create the founding moment of the style, when 30 (or possibly 31) artists – who had been turned down by the official Paris Salon – showed their work in a studio operated by the celebrated photographer Nadar, under the moniker “Société Anonyme”; the Salon des Refusés, the repository for rejects from the Salon founded by Napoleon III, had in fact been established over a decade earlier.