Manet, the Man who Invented Modern Art, is the first Manet retrospective in France since 1983 and is the latest in a run of top drawer exhibitions Paris has played host to in recent months. The exhibition focuses on lesser-known, later works and examines his influences, his politics and of course the influence he had on others. As Inventor of the Modern and a precursor to Impressionism this show is a perfect addition to a History of Impressionism tour.
From a precursor to a successor, Odilon Redon, was a symbolist and part of the Post-Impressionist avant-garde. The exhibition at the Grand Palais will feature 170 works, from his haunting noirs to wonderfully  colourful pastel compositions.
Far more Impressionist pictures can be seen in the region covered by this tour than in any other territory of comparable size. This should be no surprise, as this is the region where Impressionism was born and where it was most practised, and the tour visits some of the key sites in that development.
As it was for mainstream artists, so it was for rebels and innovators: throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Paris was the centre of the art world. All the French Impressionists spent time here, many lived here for most of their lives.
Yet the essence of their art – the recording of the world about them as it presented itself to their eyes in its immediate, transitory aspect – required them to spend time in the countryside. And the countryside they frequented most was in the north and north-west of Paris, the broad valley of the meandering Seine and of its tributaries, the Oise and the Epte, and on to the coast.
Impressionism was developing at the same time as seaside tourism on France’s northern coast (the Mediterranean was not a holiday destination until later) and the relationship between the two is fascinating. Water, fresh or salt, was an important ingredient of Impressionist pictures, its fleeting, changing, evanescent qualities similar to the characteristics of light they sought to capture on canvas. The Impressionist emphasis on the importance of painting en plein air makes a tour that includes sites where painters set up their easel particularly rewarding.