In the year 1880, the painter Mary Cassatt and her extended family lived in an apartment in the Montmartre district of Paris. The apartment was close enough to Cassatt's studio that she could walk home for afternoon tea. On her way, she would pass by Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, where a group of painters who called themselves “the Impressionists” often gathered to share their opinions on color, brushstrokes, sunlight, and the strictures of the art establishment. The group included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Georges-Pierre Seurat, and Alfred Sisley, all artists who had broken the rules of academic painting and had consequently been excluded from showing their work at the Salon, the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts.