Édouard Manet: The Painter Who Opened Modern Art

His father wanted him to study law. Édouard refused, and when his father refused in turn to let him become a painter, he tried for the naval college, failed the entrance exam, and sailed as an apprentice pilot on a transport ship. After a second failure in 1849, his parents finally gave in.¹

He trained for six years with the classical painter Thomas Couture, and at the Louvre he copied Titian and Velázquez.¹ Spanish painting would stay with him: his Spanish Singer was a hit at the Salon of 1861.¹

The official Salon jury rejected his large Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, so he showed it at the Salon des Refusés, created for the many rejected works.¹

The composition was borrowed from old masters, Giorgione and Raphael. What shocked was the modernity: a naked woman sitting with two young men in contemporary clothes, under a harsh light, in a woodland with deliberately unrealistic perspective. It earned him a “carnival notoriety” that would follow him for most of his career.¹

Two years later, Olympia made things worse. A reclining nude looks straight at the viewer, flattened by brilliant light. Critics and public called it indecent.¹ In 1907, the statesman Georges Clemenceau would install it in the Louvre.¹

The young novelist Émile Zola defended him in a long article in 1867, and Manet thanked him with a portrait. In 1870 Henri Fantin-Latour painted A Studio at Batignolles: Manet at his easel, surrounded by Zola, Renoir, Monet and Bazille.¹

Manet met Berthe Morisot at the Louvre and painted her many times; she later married his brother Eugène.¹ And in 1874 he painted on the banks of the Seine with Claude Monet.¹ That summer he also painted Monet's family in their garden at Argenteuil.

Manet was friendly with Monet and the others, but he never showed in their independent exhibitions. He kept sending his paintings to the official Salon.¹ He was the bridge between old painting and new, not a member of the group. If you want to know how that group got its name, read our story of Impressionism.

By 1880 his legs were affected by the illness that would kill him. At the Salon of 1882 he showed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère: a barmaid faces us, and a mirror behind her reflects the crowd and a customer, as if we were standing in his place.¹

Britannica calls it radical, for the way it erases the boundary between the viewer and what is viewed.¹ It was his last great contribution to modern painting. He died in Paris the following spring, at 51.¹