Édouard Manet

• 1. Introduction

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  Edouard Manet was born in Paris on the 23rd of January 1832, into a household where his father was a French judge who had mapped out a clear future: law, respectability, perhaps eventually the navy. What the elder Auguste Manet did not plan for was a son who would abandon all of it to paint the streets, the cafes, and the brothels of modern Paris. Manet's two early paintings, The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, hit the Paris art world in 1863 and 1865 like nothing it had seen before. Critics recoiled. Visitors threatened to tear the canvases from the walls. Yet progressive artists immediately recognised something new had arrived. The questions those two years raise are still worth sitting with. Why did a nude woman in a park cause a national scandal? Why did a man trained in classical technique choose to paint with what one critic called a "floor mop"? And how did someone who never once joined the Impressionist exhibitions become the single artist most credited with inventing modern painting?

• 2. A Reluctant Student

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  At the secondary school Collège Rollin, where Manet boarded from 1844 to 1848, he showed little academic talent and was largely unhappy. His father wanted law; his uncle Edmond Fournier wanted something else entirely and took the young Manet to the Louvre. In 1845, at that uncle's suggestion, Manet enrolled in a special drawing course. There he met Antonin Proust, the future Minister of Fine Arts, who would remain his lifelong friend and, later, the man who persuaded the French government to award Manet the Légion d'honneur in 1881.

  His father sent him to Rio de Janeiro on a training vessel in 1848, still hoping the navy might take hold. It did not. After failing the naval examination twice, Auguste Manet relented. From 1850 to 1856, Edouard studied under the academic painter Thomas Couture. Couture encouraged painting contemporary life, but he was eventually horrified when Manet turned that instruction toward subjects he considered low and degenerate, including The Absinthe Drinker. In his spare time, Manet copied Diego Velazquez and Titian in the Louvre. Between 1853 and 1856 he also made brief visits to Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, where the Dutch painter Frans Hals left a lasting mark on how he thought about loose, direct brushwork.

• 3. A Painting That Drew Threats

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  Music in the Tuileries, probably painted in 1860 and exhibited in 1862, was among Manet's first major public tests. The painting showed a crowd of real contemporary Parisians enjoying leisure in the Tuileries Garden, including the poet Charles Baudelaire, the musician Jacques Offenbach, and a self-portrait of Manet himself. No gods, no historical heroes, no allegory. One Manet biographer later wrote that it is difficult to imagine "the kind of fury" the painting provoked.

  The public was accustomed to the meticulous, finely detailed brushwork of historical painters such as Ernest Meissonier. Manet's thick, abbreviated strokes looked crude and unfinished to viewers raised on that standard. The subject matter deepened the offence: by portraying his own social circle in a setting that historically belonged to classical subjects, Manet appeared to challenge the entire hierarchy of what painting was supposed to commemorate. Some visitors threatened to destroy the canvas. One of the painting's few defenders was Manet's own idol, Eugene Delacroix. Despite the hostile reception, the controversy made Manet a well-known name across Paris. The episode also sharpened the central argument that would define his career: whether modern urban life was a worthy subject for serious art.

• 4. Scandal at the Salon

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  The Paris Salon rejected The Luncheon on the Grass in 1863, but it was far from buried. Emperor Napoleon III had created the Salon des Refusés after the official Selection Committee accepted only 2,217 paintings from more than 5,000 submissions, and Manet agreed to show the rejected work there. The painting placed two fully dressed men alongside a nude woman in an outdoor setting, rendered in Manet's sketch-like handling that one critic said looked as if it had been done with a "floor mop". His friend Antonin Proust celebrated it. The novelist Emile Zola was so moved that he later based the title painting of his novel L'Oeuvre on it.

  Olympia, completed in 1863 but shown at the Paris Salon in 1865, pushed the confrontation further. The pose traced Titian's Venus of Urbino from 1538 and also recalled Francisco Goya's The Nude Maja from 1800, but Manet's version was unmistakably contemporary. His nude was a self-assured prostitute, thin against the prevailing standard of beauty, wearing only an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon, and mule slippers. Antonin Proust recorded that only precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting from being punctured and torn by offended visitors. The avant-garde community thought otherwise. Gustave Courbet, Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin all recognised what Manet had done. Both works were soon praised as breakthrough acts pointing toward Impressionism.

• 5. The Batignolles Circle

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  Berthe Morisot connected Manet to a generation of painters who would reshape European art. The supposed grand-niece of Jean-Honore Fragonard, Morisot had her first painting accepted at the Salon de Paris in 1864. Manet became her friend and colleague in 1868, and she is credited with persuading him to attempt plein air painting, a practice she had taken up after her own friend Camille Corot introduced her to it. Their relationship was reciprocal: Manet absorbed her techniques and incorporated them into his canvases; she brought him into the circle that became widely known as the Batignolles group, including Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Cezanne, and Camille Pissarro. In 1874, Morisot married Manet's brother Eugene, becoming his sister-in-law. Scholars have speculated about a deeper feeling between them, pointing to the numerous portraits Manet painted of her before that marriage.

  Manet's formal student was Eva Gonzales, daughter of the novelist Emmanuel Gonzales, and the only pupil he ever officially taught. He also maintained a close friendship with the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, painting two portraits of him; Chabrier owned 14 of Manet's paintings and dedicated his Impromptu to Manet's wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, whom Manet had married in 1863. Suzanne was a Dutch-born piano teacher two years his senior; she had originally been employed by his father to teach the Manet brothers piano, and the timing and circumstances of her son Leon Koella Leenhoff's birth in 1852 left his paternity permanently ambiguous.

• 6. War and Politics

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  On the 18th of March 1871, from Bordeaux where he had gone during the Franco-Prussian War, Manet wrote to his friend Felix Bracquemond that he could not imagine France being represented by "such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers." During the war itself, Manet served in the National Guard alongside Degas to help defend Paris during the siege. He retreated to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees in January 1871; while he was away, friends added his name to the Fédération des artistes of the Paris Commune without his presence or necessarily his consent.

  His feelings about the Commune were complicated and shifting, as his letters show. What remained consistent was his allegiance to the republican cause. The public figure he admired most was Leon Gambetta, and during the seize mai coup of 1877 Manet opened his studio to a republican electoral meeting chaired by Gambetta's friend Eugene Spuller. His engagement with political violence is most visible in the three painted versions of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, produced between 1867 and 1869. The subject was the shooting by Mexican firing squad of a Habsburg emperor installed by Napoleon III. The works were so pointed as political commentary that neither the paintings nor a lithograph of the subject was permitted to be shown in France. They look back formally to Goya and were later seen as anticipating Picasso's Guernica.

• 7. The Final Decade

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  By his mid-forties, Manet's left leg had begun to fail him. He started hydrotherapy treatments in 1879 at a spa near Meudon, believing his problem was circulatory; in reality he was suffering from locomotor ataxia, a known side effect of syphilis. In 1880, still at Meudon, he painted a portrait of the opera singer Emilie Ambre as Carmen. Ambre and her companion Gaston de Beauplan had organised the first exhibition of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian in New York in December 1879.

  His last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, was completed in 1882 and hung at the Salon that year. After it, he limited himself to small formats. His last paintings were of flowers in glass vases; twenty such works are known, and the final one was painted in March 1883. In April of that year, his left foot was amputated because of gangrene caused by complications from syphilis and rheumatism. He died eleven days later, on the 30th of April 1883, and is buried at the Passy Cemetery in Paris.

  In 1875, a book-length French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven had included lithographs by Manet alongside a translation by Stephane Mallarme, and Mallarme, along with Charles Baudelaire and Emile Zola, had been among his most steadfast champions in print. Zola wrote in 1867 that Manet's paintings offered "such simple and direct translations of reality" and "a truly charming experience" in their "luminous and serious" qualities. At his death, Manet left a catalogue of 430 oil paintings, 89 pastels, and more than 400 works on paper, as counted by Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein in 1975.

• 8. The Father of Modernism

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  Art historian Beatrice Farwell wrote that Manet "has been universally regarded as the Father of Modernism." The technical explanation for that judgment is specific. Manet rejected the method he had learned under Thomas Couture, in which paintings were built up through successive layers of paint on a dark-toned ground. In its place he adopted a direct alla prima approach: opaque paint on a light ground, with the possibility of finishing a canvas in a single sitting. The Impressionists adopted this method, and it became the dominant technique for oil painting across the generations that followed.

  The auction market confirms a lasting fascination. His late painting Le Printemps from 1881 sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for US$65.1 million at Christie's on the 5th of November 2014, far exceeding its pre-sale estimate of US$25-35 million and setting a new auction record for Manet. His previous record had been held by his Self-Portrait with Palette, which had sold for US$33.2 million at Sotheby's on the 22nd of June 2010. In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a two-person exhibition pairing Manet with Degas, the colleague alongside whom he had once stood guard in a besieged Paris.