Since the appearance of the earliest Daguerreotypes in the late 1830s, the relationship between photography and painting was a close one. The camera’s artificial eye in the work of photographers such as Le Gray, Cuvelier, Nadar and Disderi stimulated Manet, Degas and the young Impressionists to formulate a new way of seeing the world.

This is the subject of the exhibition The Impressionists and Photography which Friends of the museum can visit in private, accompanied by an art historian, as one of the Temporary Exhibition focus tours, on this occasion taking place on Sundays 20 and 27 and Monday 28 October.