Édouard Manet

• 1. The Naval Failure And The Louvre

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  Édouard Manet was born in Paris on the 23rd of January 1832. He entered a world of privilege within an ancestral mansion on the Rue des Petits Augustins. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected his son to follow a path into law or diplomacy. Instead, young Édouard found himself drawn to the sea. In 1848, he sailed on a training vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. This journey marked the beginning of a struggle that would define his early years.

  He failed the examination to join the Navy twice. These failures were not merely academic setbacks but personal crises that forced a change in direction. After the second attempt, his father relented and allowed him to pursue art education. From 1850 to 1856, Manet studied under the academic painter Thomas Couture. Couture encouraged his students to paint contemporary life, though he eventually became horrified by Manet's choice of lower-class subjects like The Absinthe Drinker.

  In his spare time, Manet copied Old Masters such as Diego Velázquez and Titian in the Louvre. He made brief visits to Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands between 1853 and 1856. During these travels, he absorbed influences from the Dutch painter Frans Hals and Spanish artists like Francisco José de Goya. By 1856, he opened his own studio with a style characterized by loose brush strokes and simplified details.

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• 2. The Luncheon On The Grass

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  The Paris Salon rejected The Luncheon on the Grass for exhibition in 1863. Manet agreed to exhibit it at the Salon des Refusés instead. This parallel salon was initiated by Emperor Napoleon III after the official selection committee accepted only 2,217 paintings out of more than 5,000 submissions. It gave rejected artists the opportunity to display their work if they chose.

  The painting juxtaposed fully dressed men with a nude woman. Critics stated that the brushwork appeared to have been done with a floor mop. One critic wrote that the handling was abbreviated and sketch-like, an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. Despite this criticism, others like his friend Antonin Proust celebrated the painting. Novelist Émile Zola was so affected by viewing it that he later based the title painting in his novel L'œuvre on Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

  Manet's composition revealed his study of old masters. The disposition of the main figures derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris based on a drawing by Raphael. Two additional works cited as important precedents were Pastoral Concert and The Tempest, attributed variously to Giorgione or Titian. Following the Salon, Manet became yet more notorious and widely discussed.

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• 3. Olympia And The Public Fury

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  Manet embarked on the canvas for Olympia after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. He completed the work between 1863 and 1865. The painting is a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino from 1538. It also recalls Francisco Goya's painting The Nude Maja from 1800.

  The painting was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865 where it created a scandal. According to Antonin Proust, only precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting from being punctured and torn by offended viewers. The controversy arose partly because the nude wore small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, and mule slippers. These accessories accentuated her nakedness and comfortable courtesan lifestyle.

  A fully dressed black servant appears in the background, exploiting then-current theories about race and sexuality. Her body is thin, counter to prevailing standards, and the lack of idealism rankled viewers. A contemporary critic denounced Olympia's shamelessly flexed left hand as a mockery of the relaxed, shielding hand of Titian's Venus. The alert black cat at the foot of the bed struck a sexually rebellious note compared to the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal.

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• 4. The Batignolles Circle

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  Manet became friends with Impressionists Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro through another painter named Berthe Morisot. She drew him into their activities and they later became widely known as the Batignolles group. Morisot had her first painting accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864 and continued to show there for the next ten years.

  He became the friend and colleague of Morisot in 1868. She is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting which she had been practicing since introduced by Camille Corot. They shared a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into his paintings. In 1874, she became his sister-in-law when she married his brother Eugène.

  Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it. Nevertheless, when excluded from the International Exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried he would waste all his inheritance on this project which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from major critics, it provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters including Degas.

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• 5. War And The Execution

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  Manet's response to modern life included works devoted to war. The first such work was The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama from 1864. This sea skirmish known as the Battle of Cherbourg took place off the French coast during the American Civil War and may have been witnessed by the artist.

  Of interest next was the French intervention in Mexico. From 1867 to 1869 Manet painted three versions of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. These are among Manet's largest paintings suggesting the theme was one which the painter regarded as most important. Its subject is the execution by Mexican firing squad of a Habsburg emperor installed by Napoleon III. Neither the paintings nor a lithograph of the subject were permitted to be shown in France.

  During the Franco-Prussian War, Manet served in the National Guard to help defend Paris. In January 1871, he traveled to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees. His friends added his name to the Fédération des artistes of the Paris Commune while he was away. He stayed outside Paris until after the semaine sanglante ended on the 28th of May.

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• 6. The Decline And The Amputation

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  In his mid-forties Manet's health deteriorated and he developed severe pain and partial paralysis in his legs. In 1879 he began receiving hydrotherapy treatments at a spa near Meudon intended to improve what he believed was a circulatory problem. In reality he was suffering from locomotor ataxia, a known side-effect of syphilis.

  In April 1883, 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 in Paris. He is buried in the Passy Cemetery in the city.

  Despite this physical decline, he painted many small-scale still lifes of fruits and vegetables such as A Bunch of Asparagus and The Lemon both completed in 1880. He completed his last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, in 1882. It hung in the Salon that year before he limited himself to small formats. His last paintings were flowers in glass vases with the final one painted in March 1883 barely two months before his death.

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• 7. The Father Of Modernism

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  Manet's public career lasted from 1861 until his death in 1883. His known extant works comprise 430 oil paintings, 89 pastels, and more than 400 works on paper according to catalogues from 1975. Although harshly condemned by critics who decried its lack of conventional finish, Manet's work had admirers from the beginning.

  One was Émile Zola who wrote in 1867 about seeing simple and direct translations of reality. He noted a surprisingly elegant awkwardness in the luminous and serious painting which interpreted nature with gentle brutality. The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in Manet's paintings was seen as specifically modern and as a challenge to Renaissance works he copied or used as source material.

  Art historian Beatrice Farwell says Manet has been universally regarded as the Father of Modernism. With Courbet he was among the first to take serious risks with the public whose favor he sought. He was the first to make alla prima painting the standard technique for oil painting and one of the first to take liberties with Renaissance perspective. In 2014, Le Printemps sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $65.1 million setting a new auction record.

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