David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

twelve- and thirteen-year-olds is to make it seem exciting—and twenty-nine kids was exciting. “There were so many more peers to interact with,” she said. “They weren’t always relating with just this one group. There was more opportunity to vary your experiences. And that’s the real issue—what can be done to enliven, enrich, and engage the child, so they aren’t just being passive.”
    Did she want twenty-nine children in every classroom at Shepaug? Of course not. DeBrito knew that she was a bit unusual and that the ideal number for most teachers was lower than that. Her point was simply that on the question of class size, we have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious of what can also be good about large classes. It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning? When she thought back to that year in Meriden, DeBrito got a faraway look in her eyes. “I like the noise. I like to hear them interact. Oh, it was fun.”

1.
    One hundred and fifty years ago, when Paris was at the center of the art world, a group of painters used to gather every evening at Café Guerbois, in the neighborhood of Batignolles. The ringleader of the group was Édouard Manet. He was one of the oldest and most established members of the group, a handsome and gregarious man in his early thirties who dressed in the height of fashion and charmed all those around him with his energy and humor. Manet’s great friend was Edgar Degas. He was among the few who could match wits with Manet; the two shared a fiery spirit and a sharp tongue and would sometimes descend into bitter argument. Paul Cézanne, tall and gruff, would come and sit moodily in the corner, his trousers held up with string. “I am not offering you my hand,” Cézanne said to Manet once before slumping down by himself. “I haven’t washed for eight days.” Claude Monet, self-absorbed and strong willed, was a grocer’s son who lacked the education of some of the others. His best friend was the “easygoing urchin” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who, over the course of their friendship, would paint eleven portraits of Monet. The moral compass of the group was Camille Pissarro: fiercely political, loyal, and principled. Even Cézanne—the most ornery and alienated of men—loved Pissarro. Years later, he would identify himself as “Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro.”
    Together this group of remarkable painters would go on to invent modern art with the movement known as Impressionism. They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings. When the art critics mentioned the Impressionists—and there was a small army of art critics in Paris in the 1860s—it was usually to belittle them. Manet and his friends sat in the dark-paneled Café Guerbois with its marble-topped tables and flimsy metal chairs and drank and ate and argued about politics and literature and art and most specifically about their careers—because the Impressionists all wrestled with one crucial question: What should they do about the Salon?
    Art played an enormous role in the cultural life of France in the nineteenth century. Painting was regulated by a government department called the Ministry of the Imperial House and the Fine Arts, and it was considered a profession in the same way that medicine or the law is a profession today. A promising painter would start at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he would receive a rigorous and formal education, progressing from the copying of drawings to the painting of live models. At each stage of his education, there would be competitions. Those who did poorly would be weeded out. Those who did well would win awards and prestigious fellowships, and at the pinnacle of the profession was the Salon, the most important art exhibition in all of Europe.
    Every year each of the painters of France submitted two or three of his