In the early 1860s, four young painters: Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille, met whilst studying under the academic artist Charles Gleyre. They discovered that they shared an interest in painting landscape and contemporary life and they often ventured into the countryside together to paint in the open air. They discovered that they could paint in sunlight directly from nature and making use of the vivid synthetic pigments that were available they began to develop a lighter and brighter manner of painting that extended further the Realism of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school It was radical practise at its inception but by the later decades of the 19th-century the theory had been absorbed into normal artistic practise.