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Music in the Tuileries |
In 1862, Manet exhibited Music in the Tuileries (probably painted in 1860), one of his first masterpieces. With its portrayal of a crowd of subjects at the Jardin des Tuileries, the painting shows the outdoor leisure of contemporary Paris, which would be a lifelong subject of Manet's. Among the figures in the gardens a... |
Music in the Tuileries received substantial critical and public attention, most of it negative. In the words of one Manet biographer, "it is difficult for us to imagine the kind of fury Music in the Tuileries provoked when it was exhibited". By portraying Manet's social circle instead of classical heroes, historical ic... |
Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe) |
Another major early work is The Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe), originally Le Bain. The Paris Salon rejected it for exhibition in 1863, but Manet agreed to exhibit it at the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected). This parallel salon was initiated by Emperor Napoleon III as a solution to the public ... |
The painting's juxtaposition of fully dressed men and a nude woman was controversial, as was its abbreviated, sketch-like handling, an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. One critic stated that the brushwork appeared to have been done with a "floor mop". However, others such as his friend Antonin Proust c... |
At the same time, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) based on a drawing by Raphael. Two additional works cited by scholars as important precedents for Le Déjeuner sur l'herb... |
Le Déjeuner and James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl were the two most discussed works of the Salon des Refusés, which itself would become one of the most famous art exhibitions of all time. Following the Salon, Manet became yet more notorious and widely discussed. However, Le Déjeuner sur ... |
Olympia |
As he had in Luncheon on the Grass, Manet again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist in the painting Olympia (1863), a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's pain... |
Manet embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. His uniquely frank depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865, where it created a scandal. According to Antonin Proust, "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the pa... |
Olympia's body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. ... |
Olympia was the subject of caricatures in the popular press, but was championed by the French avant-garde community, and the painting's significance was appreciated by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin. |
As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society. |
Life and times |
After the death of his father in 1862, Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863 at a Protestant church. Leenhoff was a Dutch-born piano teacher two years Manet's senior with whom he had been romantically involved for approximately ten years. Leenhoff initially had been employed by Manet's father, Auguste, to teach Manet ... |
Manet painted his wife in The Reading, among other paintings. Her son, Leon Leenhoff, whose father may have been either of the Manets, posed often for Manet. Most famously, he is the subject of the Boy Carrying a Sword of 1861 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). He also appears as the boy carrying a tray in the bac... |
Manet became friends with the Impressionists Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne, and Camille Pissarro through another painter, Berthe Morisot, who was a member of the group and drew him into their activities. They later became widely known as the Batignolles group (Le groupe d... |
The supposed grand-niece of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Morisot had her first painting accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864, and she continued to show in the salon for the next ten years. |
Manet 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 she was introduced to it by another friend of hers, Camille Corot. They had a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into h... |
Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International Exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would ... |
Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, Manet resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions, partly because he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity, and partly because he preferred to exhibit at the Salon. Eva Gonzalès, a daughter of the novelist Emmanu... |
He was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Monet and Morisot. Their influence is seen in Manet's use of lighter colors: after the early 1870s he made less use of dark backgrounds but retained his distinctive use of black, uncharacteristic of Impressionist painting. He painted many outdoor (plein air) pieces, b... |
Manet enjoyed a close friendship with composer Emmanuel Chabrier, painting two portraits of him; the musician owned 14 of Manet's paintings and dedicated his Impromptu to Manet's wife. |
One of Manet's frequent models at the beginning of the 1880s was the "semimondaine" Méry Laurent, who posed for seven portraits in pastel. Laurent's salons hosted many French (and even American) writers and painters of her time; Manet had connections and influence through such events. |
Throughout his life, although resisted by art critics, Manet could number as his champions Émile Zola, who supported him publicly in the press, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Charles Baudelaire, who challenged him to depict life as it was. Manet, in turn, drew or painted each of them. |
Café scenes |
Manet's paintings of café scenes are observations of social life in 19th-century Paris. People are depicted drinking beer, listening to music, flirting, reading, or waiting. Many of these paintings were based on sketches executed on the spot. Manet often visited the Brasserie Reichshoffen on boulevard de Rochechourt, u... |
In Corner of a Café-Concert, a man smokes while behind him a waitress serves drinks. In The Beer Drinkers a woman enjoys her beer in the company of a friend. In The Café-Concert, shown at right, a sophisticated gentleman sits at a bar while a waitress stands resolutely in the background, sipping her drink. In The Waitr... |
Manet also sat at the restaurant on the Avenue de Clichy called Pere Lathuille's, which had a garden in addition to the dining area. One of the paintings he produced here was Chez le père Lathuille (At Pere Lathuille's), in which a man displays an unrequited interest in a woman dining near him. |
In Le Bon Bock (1873), a large, cheerful, bearded man sits with a pipe in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, looking straight at the viewer. |
Paintings of social activities |
Manet painted the upper class enjoying more formal social activities. In Masked Ball at the Opera, Manet shows a lively crowd of people enjoying a party. Men stand with top hats and long black suits while talking to women with masks and costumes. He included portraits of his friends in this picture. |
His 1868 painting The Luncheon was posed in the dining room of the Manet house. |
Manet depicted other popular activities in his work. In The Races at Longchamp, an unusual perspective is employed to underscore the furious energy of racehorses as they rush toward the viewer. In Skating, Manet shows a well dressed woman in the foreground, while others skate behind her. Always there is the sense of ac... |
In View of the International Exhibition, soldiers relax, seated and standing, prosperous couples are talking. There is a gardener, a boy with a dog, a woman on horseback—in short, a sample of the classes and ages of the people of Paris. |
War |
Manet's response to modern life included works devoted to war, in subjects that may be seen as updated interpretations of the genre of "history painting". The first such work was The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama (1864), a sea skirmish known as the Battle of Cherbourg from the American Civil War which took pl... |
Of interest next was the French intervention in Mexico; from 1867 to 1869 Manet painted three versions of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, an event which raised concerns regarding French foreign and domestic policy. The several versions of the Execution are among Manet's largest paintings, which suggests that the t... |
During the Franco-Prussian War, Manet served in the National Guard to help defend the city during the siege of Paris, along with Degas. In January 1871, he traveled to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees. In his absence his friends added his name to the "Fédération des artistes" (see: Courbet) of the Paris Commune. Man... |
The prints and drawings collection of the Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest) has a watercolour/gouache by Manet, The Barricade, depicting a summary execution of Communards by Versailles troops based on a lithograph of the execution of Maximilian. A similar piece, The Barricade (oil on plywood), is held by a private collect... |
On 18 March 1871, he wrote to his (confederate) friend Félix Bracquemond in Paris about his visit to Bordeaux, the provisional seat of the French National Assembly of the Third French Republic where Émile Zola introduced him to the sites: "I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, n... |
The public figure Manet admired most was the republican Léon Gambetta. In the heat of the seize mai coup in 1877, Manet opened up his atelier to a republican electoral meeting chaired by Gambetta's friend Eugène Spuller. |
Paris |
Manet depicted many scenes of the streets of Paris in his works. The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags depicts red, white, and blue pennants covering buildings on either side of the street; another painting of the same title features a one-legged man walking with crutches. Again depicting the same street, but this time in ... |
The Railway, widely known as The Gare Saint-Lazare, was painted in 1873. The setting is the urban landscape of Paris in the late 19th century. Using his favorite model in his last painting of her, a fellow painter, Victorine Meurent, also the model for Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass, sits before an iron fence ho... |
Instead of choosing the traditional natural view as background for an outdoor scene, Manet opts for the iron grating which "boldly stretches across the canvas". The only evidence of the train is its white cloud of steam. In the distance, modern apartment buildings are seen. This arrangement compresses the foreground in... |
Historian Isabelle Dervaux has described the reception this painting received when it was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy. Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized ... |
Manet painted several boating subjects in 1874. Boating, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exemplifies in its conciseness the lessons Manet learned from Japanese prints, and the abrupt cropping by the frame of the boat and sail adds to the immediacy of the image. |
In 1875, a book-length French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven included lithographs by Manet and translation by Mallarmé. |
In 1881, with pressure from his friend Antonin Proust, the French government awarded Manet the Légion d'honneur. |
Late works |
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, but in reality he was suffering from locomotor ataxia, a known side-effe... |
In his last years Manet painted many small-scale still lifes of fruits and vegetables, such as A Bunch of Asparagus and The Lemon (both 1880). He completed his last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère), in 1882, and it hung in the Salon that year. Afterwards, he limited himself to small f... |
Manet's last paintings were of flowers in glass vases. There are 20 such paintings known, with the last one painted in March 1883, barely two months before his death. Quoted in Venice thirteen years later, Manet is credited with stating that an artist can say everything he has to say with "flowers, fruit, and clouds." ... |
In 2023, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City exhibited a two-person exhibition of Manet with Degas. |
Death |
In April 1883, his left foot was amputated because of gangrene caused by complications from syphilis and rheumatism. He died eleven days later on 30 April in Paris. He is buried in the Passy Cemetery in the city. |
Legacy |
Manet's public career lasted from 1861, the year of his first participation in the Salon, until his death in 1883. His known extant works, as catalogued in 1975 by Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein, comprise 430 oil paintings, 89 pastels, and more than 400 works on paper. |
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: "We are not accustomed to seeing such simple and direct translations of reality. Then, as I said, there is such a surprisingly elegant awkwardness ... i... |
The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in Manet's paintings was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works he copied or used as source material. He rejected the technique he had learned in the studio of Thomas Couture – in which a painting was constructed using successive laye... |
The 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 favour he sought, the first to make alla prima painting the standard technique for oil painting and one of the first to take liberties ... |
Art market |
The late Manet painting, Le Printemps (1881), sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $65.1 million, setting a new auction record for Manet, exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $25–35 million at Christie's on 5 November 2014. The previous auction record was held by Self-Portrait With Palette which sold for $33.2 million at... |
Gallery |
See also |
List of paintings by Édouard Manet |
Realism |
Hispagnolisme |
Portraiture |
History of painting |
Western painting |
Notes |
References |
Further reading |
Short introductory works |
Néret, Gilles (2003). Manet. Taschen. ISBN 3822819492. |
Richardson, John (1992). Manet. Phaidon Colour Library. ISBN 071482755X. |
Smee, Sebastian (2016). The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art. Random House. ISBN 9780812985078. One of the friendships is that of Manet and Edgar Degas, pp. 91-176. |
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