Modern Age
Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
French Impressionism painter.
Édouard Manet was born in 1832 into the Parisian upper bourgeoisie and, though he became the pivotal figure between the old painting and the new, he never stopped seeking the approval of the official Salon. Trained under Thomas Couture and steeped in the museum masters — above all the Spanish, Velázquez and Goya, and the Dutch — he set out to paint modern life with the frankness and directness he found in them.
In the early 1860s he detonated two scandals that would define modern art. 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe', shown at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, placed a nonchalant naked woman among clothed men in a park; 'Olympia', shown in 1865, met a courtesan's cool, confronting stare with flat, shadowless light. Critics were appalled by the flatness, the lack of academic modelling, and the unidealised modern subject — precisely the qualities the younger painters revered.
Though he is inseparable from Impressionism and was the admired elder of Monet, Degas, and Berthe Morisot — who was his model and became his sister-in-law — Manet refused to exhibit in the group's independent shows, holding out for the Salon. He kept the defenders of a lifetime: the poet Baudelaire urged him toward the painting of modern life, and the young Émile Zola staked his critical reputation on him in 1867. His last great picture, 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère' (1882), fixed the mirrored dazzle of modern Paris the year before his early death in 1883.
The words the record keeps using: frank, cool, modern, elegant, provocative, detached, assured.
At a glance
- Lived 1832–1883
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Broken color
Works in the archive
- Olympia, 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A reclining nude — unmistakably a modern Parisian courtesan, named for a fashionable demimondaine — meets the viewer's eye with cool, unabashed directness while a servant brings flowers from an unseen client. Painted in… - Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Two clothed, fashionably dressed men picnic in a wood with a naked woman who turns to gaze frankly out at the viewer, a second woman bathing behind. Rejected by the 1863 Salon jury, it was shown at the Salon des Refusés… - The Fifer (Le Fifre), 1866 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A boy military bandsman plays the fife, set alone against a plain, all-but-empty grey ground with no floor line or setting. Rejected by the 1866 Salon jury, it shows Manet at his most radically flat and economical,… - A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 (Courtauld Gallery, London)
A barmaid stands facing us behind her marble counter of bottles and fruit at the fashionable Folies-Bergère music hall, while a great mirror behind her reflects the glittering, gaslit crowd. Manet's last major painting,…
What was said
In a long essay of 1867 the young Émile Zola defended Manet against the ridicule of the Salon, praising the frankness and simplicity of his vision — the way he set down what he saw in frank areas of tone rather than academic finish — and predicting that his place among the masters in the Louvre was assured.
The poet Charles Baudelaire, Manet's friend and the theorist of 'the painting of modern life', encouraged him in his ambition to render contemporary Paris and, when the Olympia scandal wounded him, wrote to steady his nerve and remind him of his own worth.
Berthe Morisot, herself a gifted painter, sat repeatedly for Manet from 1868 and was a close artistic companion; in 1874 she married his younger brother Eugène, making her his sister-in-law as well as his model and interlocutor.
Lineage
Learned from Gustave Courbet, Diego Velázquez
Passed on to Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas
What would Édouard make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Édouard Manet", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Édouard · Keep a life moment the way Édouard would · Pictures made after Édouard