Story and photos by Stephanie Levin.
Feature Image: Waterlilies – Claude Monet
A collective gasp erupted in the art world in June 2025 when the 300-year-old portrait of Ferdinando de’ Medici, housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, sustained enough damage to be lifted off the wall and rushed to the restoration studio. The culprit: a photo-seeking tourist posing for a selfie who tripped and tore a hole in poor Ferdinando de’ Medici’s priceless portrait.
Imagine if deceased masters could talk: Word of the tear spread fast and furious across artistic borders, instantly reaching the 5th floor of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris just as the Monday night Impressionist chat salon commenced among those whose paintings hung on the walls. Closed to the public on Mondays, the museum is eerily quiet except for the 5th floor, where a handful of Impressionist portraits gather for their weekly soirée. The topic this Monday was none other than selfies.
Vincent van Gogh, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Gustave Caillebotte, and Edgar Degas had agreed for some time that a peculiar phenomenon was occurring among their viewing public. The 5th floor draws enormous crowds, and the artists residing here consider their space the crème de la crème, referred to by some as “the floor of dreams.” The Impressionists reside on prime artistic real estate, and it’s an honor to hang on the walls of the 5th floor. The Monday night Impressionists concluded that they would not like to live anywhere else. The chats had for some time focused on tourist behavior, and frankly, it confused the old masters.
It was Vincent van Gogh who leapt into the discussion from Starry Night, exclaiming that he had dipped in and out of depression throughout his short artistic career and never sold a painting in his lifetime.
“I painted Starry Night by candlelight, Arles illuminated by gas lamps in the foreground,” he said. The rant continued, van Gogh asking his companions whether the hundreds of people who pose for a smiling selfie with his painting ever stopped to consider that he had spent a great deal of time in an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, wrestling with his imagination to create the chromatic blue swirls and orbs of radiating stars in the expressive night sky. Personally, he regarded Starry Night as an utter failure — all style, no substance. “Imagine,” he added, “after ending my life a year later, that painting is now regarded as a masterpiece.” He scratched his beard, shook his head, and wondered what the selfie photographers would do with a photo of him, their smiling faces in the foreground.
Manet piped up from his masterpiece Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, also known as Le Bain. “My masterpiece insulted and outraged viewers and was declared offensively indecent by both the French bourgeoisie and the Parisian Salon,” he quipped. The bucolic picnic scene — borrowing a touch from Titian’s Venetian masterpiece Concert champêtre — shows two men in their dapper best, seated in the countryside enjoying an afternoon picnic with two women: one conversing with the men, comfortable and relaxed, while the other, in the distance, plucks flowers. Both women are nude. While Titian’s painting was praised, Manet’s riled the highbrows and closed the Salon where it was shown. The painting was considered scandalous, a departure from the academic tradition of depicting nude figures only in mythological contexts. It was deemed obscene.
“Then, in 1863, Olympia caused a sensational stir, to put it in gentlemen’s terms,” Manet posited. Scuffles erupted over Manet’s beautiful nude painting — too provocative, too flat a style, and a prostitute besides. Quelle horreur, voiced the critics. Such was the rage that the point of the model’s gaze mattered: rather than be the object of the male gaze, Olympia returned it right back at them. The painting caused a kerfuffle. As if the gaze weren’t enough of a stir, the orchid in Olympia’s hair — apparently a symbol of sexual desire — created a brouhaha.
“Imagine,” Manet continued, “one century my painting is lascivious, and I am the scourge of the artistic community, and the next century Olympia is the darling everyone stands in front of and desires to be photographed with.”
Renoir stepped out of his painting Nude in the Sunlight and declared that no one specialized in painting nudes as he did. “They were my focus,” he said. “Of course, common sense kept me from showing my nude paintings in any of the exhibitions. The question was how to paint a voluptuous nude in the Impressionist style.” Renoir explained that finding the light on the body — the way it plays and moves — offered a path to this Impressionist painting. Though the public received the painting well, it remained unsold until his generous, wealthy friend and fellow painter, Gustave Caillebotte, purchased it.
“Of course, it wasn’t until the mid-1880s that I painted Bain des nymphes, inspired by the sculptor Girardon,” Renoir continued. “The painting isn’t about happy nymphs relaxing and bathing; it’s a critique of modernization, loneliness, and anxiety. My nymphs were considered too linear, their bodies painted too white. But as we all know, it’s romantic bliss that is the most viewed of my paintings up here on the 5th floor. Danse à Bougival, painted in 1883, captures joy and love. It has a blissful, romantic movement, a gentle intoxication, as if nothing exists in the world except the happiness of the moment.” He paused. “I worry that with all the photographs, someone might back into the dancers — and I wonder if anyone who snaps away with those little square cameras, ever truly experiences the joy of that painting. Do people still social dance today?”
“Few pose for a selfie in front of my La Cathédrale de Rouen series, of which I made thirty different versions from the same point of view,” muttered Monet. He had set up his easel in front of the cathedral, working in two sessions from 1892 to 1893 to capture the changing light throughout the seasons. Nature was Monet’s inspiration, and he was a master at analyzing the light’s shifts. The cathedral series shows his determination to capture the refraction of light in the moment. It wasn’t until 1895 that Monet exhibited twenty versions of the cathedrals, astonishing viewers with his ability to capture seasonal light.
“Frankly, it’s not La Cathédrale paintings I fret about, it’s my Nymphéas —the painting of the water lily pool in Giverny — which is the most photographed of all my paintings, and I worry that with so many selfies snapping away, someone might inadvertently injure one of my lilies with an elbow. After all, I spent the last twenty years of my life obsessed with painting Nmphéas” Monet moaned.
“I’m rather pleased to have been one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement, even though we were mocked and ridiculed at our inception,” Monet recalled. “I’m grateful to my friend and fellow painter Gustave Caillebotte, who purchased my paintings and those of other Impressionists, never doubting our talent when others cruelly criticized us.”
Gustave Caillebotte nodded at Monet and reflected on his two most-viewed paintings on the 5th floor, The Boating Party and The Floor Scrapers — the first praised, the second panned by the Salon.
Caillebotte was born into an upper-middle-class family and inherited a substantial fortune when his father died in 1873. This gave him the freedom to pursue art and to freely choose what he wanted to paint.
“My first works were rejected by the Salon. I left the École des Beaux-Arts shortly after, and connected with the Impressionist artists,” Caillebotte recalled.
While many of Caillebotte’s paintings depicted Parisian urban life to much acclaim — such as The Boating Party and Paris Street; Rainy Day — it was his depiction of men in Raboteurs de parquet, fondly called The Floor Scrapers, that rattled the art establishment.
“There were other paintings of men, though fully clothed, like Corner of the Table by Henri Fantin-Latour, for example, but working-class men, bare-chested and taut-muscled, on their hands and knees scraping wood chips off a Parisian apartment floor in the 8th arrondissement? That offended the bourgeoisie’s sensibilities. I was savaged — the painting was considered vulgar,” Caillebotte remembered, shuddering at the memory.
“I recall,” chimed in Edgar Degas. “While Caillebotte was being criticized, I was preoccupied with exploring dancers at the Opera, off in the wings for hours in rehearsal rooms studying the graceful movements of the ballerinas, “noted Degas. “I suspect I have been pigeonholed as the grand master of ballerinas, with my other paintings relegated to a rather rapid glance. And, like Monet who worries about someone backing into the Nymphéas, I fear for a smudge on the dancers’ tutus, or a fracture in a delicate arm of one of my dancers when someone snaps a photo of a friend posing next to my dancers,” concluded Degas.
As the artists settled into their paintings for the night in preparation for the following day, each offered a collective wish: visitors would view more rather than snap more, reflect on the light, the brushstrokes, and techniques of their paintings. They would sit for a few minutes and contemplate the question– what impression does a painting make on you, the viewer?
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