Édouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 into a prosperous bourgeois family — his father was a senior official at the Ministry of Justice. Against his father's wishes he signed on as a cabin boy to Brazil in 1848 and then entered the studio of Thomas Couture in 1850, where he studied for six years while spending his free hours in the Louvre copying Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt. His breakthrough and his catastrophe arrived simultaneously in 1863: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, exhibited at the Salon des Refusés after the official Salon rejected it, depicted a nude woman picnicking with two fully clothed men in contemporary dress. The public howled. Napoleon III declared it indecent. Manet had done nothing new with the composition — it was lifted directly from a Raphael engraving — but the nude's frank gaze at the viewer, combined with modern clothing on the men, destroyed the classical alibi that made nudes acceptable. Two years later, Olympia (1865) created a second uproar: a reclining nude rendered with flat, Japanese-inflected planes of light, staring coolly at the viewer with the unmistakable demeanor of a Parisian prostitute. Critics called it obscene; the painting was placed high on the Salon wall to keep crowds from touching it. Manet responded to the attacks not by withdrawing from the Salon system but by submitting work to it annually, craving official recognition even as he revolutionized what painting could be. In 1874, when the Impressionist group organized their first independent exhibition, Manet declined to join — he still wanted the Salon — though his experiments with color and light had laid the conceptual ground for the entire movement. His Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is the first major painting to depict modern leisure in the open air without allegorical justification. His portrait of Émile Zola (1868) and his unfinished masterpiece The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (c. 1867–69, based on Goya's Third of May) show a painter as politically engaged as he was formally radical. In 1882, already ill with locomotor ataxia, he completed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère — a barmaid reflected in a mirror that refuses to obey the laws of optical geometry, a meditation on modern alienation and the unstable nature of seeing. He died in Paris on 30 April 1883 at the age of fifty-one, having had his left leg amputated ten days before. His influence on every painter who came after him — Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso — is incalculable. The Musée d'Orsay now holds Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe as centerpieces of its permanent collection.
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Modernist painter · Olympia · Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Édouard Manet
1,832 CE – 1,883 CE
The Parisian painter who stood at the hinge between Realism and Impressionism, scandalizing the Salon with nude women who looked back.
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