Frédéric Bazille was a French painter involved in the development of Impressionism. Despite his short career, the artist made a number of works which helped lay the foundations of the movement. “The tall fellow Bazille has done something I find quite fine: a young girl in a very light dress in the shadow of a tree beyond which one sees a town,” the painter Berthe Morisot once said of his work The Pink Dress (1864). Born on December 5, 1841 in Montpellier, France to a wealthy Protestant family, he travelled to Paris for a career in medicine in 1862. Interested in art since his youth, while studying for medical school in the city he enrolled in the atelier of the Charles Gleyre. In Gleyre’s studio he befriended the young Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. Together with his peers, Bazille began painting en plein air as well as producing larger paintings in his studio. By the mid-1860s, the artist had already made a number of successful paintings and with the help of his father’s wealth, supporting his financially struggling friends. In a fateful choice, Bazille enlisted in the French military at the outset of the Franco-Prussian War, while many of his friends fled to avoid conscription. Tragically, the artist died in combat on November 28, 1870 in Beaune-la-Rolande, France at only 28 years old. The first Impressionist exhibition did not take place until 1874, none of Bazille’s paintings were included in the show. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Art Institute of Chicago.