The presence of work themes in the painting of the Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has until recently been largely discounted, despite the body of Impressionist works that continued the tradition, initiated by Courbet and Millet and developed through the 1880s by Breton, Bastien-Lepage, Pissaro, and Berthe Morisot, of representing rural labor, and notwithstanding the significant body of Impressionist work--including that of Degas, Caillebotte, and Morisot--representing urban or suburban labor. The notion of Impressionism as concerned primarily with the representation of leisure has less to do, however, with the subject matter of the paintings than with the acceptance of the view, widely held in nineteenth-century France, that considered peasants performing physically demanding rural labor as the epitome of work. The numerous Impressionist representations of activities (often those of women) that we might classify as work--a woman serving beer in a cafe, many paintings by Degas of the ballet (a physically demanding activity by any standard)--were instead classified as representations of leisure by those who held this view.