Olympia
Édouard Manet · 1863
Edouard Manet
French · 1832–1883
The painter of modern Paris, whose picnic nudes, café bars and portraits of friends scandalised the official Salon and opened the way to Impressionism.
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Play CollectionParis and the Salon
Manet was born in Paris in January 1832, into an affluent family with good connections, and spent six years under Thomas Couture, an academic painter who urged his pupils to take contemporary life as their subject and then recoiled at what his pupil made of the advice.
The Salon accepted two of his canvases in 1861, and younger painters were already watching him. His freely brushed surfaces, so unlike the polished finish the juries rewarded, drew both mockery and disciples, and his circle soon included the painters who would exhibit together as the Impressionists.
Two scandals
In 1863 the jury rejected the Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a naked woman lunching with two fully clothed men, and Manet sent it instead to the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of the rejected, where it became one of the two most talked-about pictures in Paris. He came out of the affair famous.
Two years later Olympia, a nude modelled by Victorine Meurent and read by every Salon visitor as a prostitute, was accepted and caused a scandal of another order; the popular press filled with caricatures of it while the avant-garde rallied to its defence, from Courbet and Cézanne to Monet, who later organised the subscription that brought the painting to the French state.
Friends and last years
Through Berthe Morisot, whom he met in 1868 and painted many times, Manet became a friend of Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Pissarro. Yet he stood aside from their independent exhibitions: he preferred to keep seeking the Salon's walls and refused to stand as a group's representative. Their influence shows all the same in the lighter palette of his later years, when the dark grounds of the 1860s give way to daylight, though he kept his characteristic use of black, which the Impressionists had given up.
His health broke in his mid-forties, his legs growing painful and partly paralysed; he kept working, and in 1882 the Salon hung A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, his last major painting. In April 1883 his left foot was amputated after gangrene set in, and he died eleven days later, on 30 April, aged fifty-one.
Known works
Luncheon on the Grass
Édouard Manet · 1863
Musée d'Orsay
Luncheon on the Grass. A nude woman sits with two fully dressed men on the grass of a wood, a second bather bathing in the stream behind; the jury of 1863 refused it, and at the Salon des Refusés it made Manet's name a public controversy.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
Édouard Manet · 1882
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. A barmaid behind her marble counter meets our eye while the great mirror behind her throws back the crowd, the chandeliers and a gentleman whose reflection will not quite obey the geometry; his last major work, painted in 1882 and hung at that year's Salon.
The Balcony
Édouard Manet · 1868
Musée d'Orsay
The Balcony. Berthe Morisot seated like a dark odalisque, the painter Guillemet standing behind her and the violinist Fanny Claus beside him, green shutters and a dim interior holding the three figures in bars of light and shade; shown at the Salon of 1869.
Music in the Tuileries
Édouard Manet · 1862
National Gallery
Music in the Tuileries. A concert audience under the trees, top hats and crinolines crowded shoulder to shoulder, among them Baudelaire, Offenbach and the artist himself; an early masterpiece of his painterly style and of the leisure of modern Paris that would occupy him all his life.
The Fif
Édouard Manet · 1866
Musée d'Orsay
The Fifer. A boy of the Spanish army in uniform, fife at his lips, painted flat against a grey ground with no horizon and no shadow, so the eye can find nothing to measure him by; the idea came to Manet from Velázquez, whose work in the Prado had stunned him in 1865.
Portrait of Emile Zola
Édouard Manet · 1868
Musée d'Orsay
Portrait of Emile Zola. The novelist and critic at his desk among the props of his trade, a print after Velázquez and a Japanese screen above the books; sent to the Salon of 1868.
Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets
Édouard Manet · 1872
Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets. The painter in black mourning dress, her face and eyes luminous against it, the violets of the title almost lost in the dark; one of the many portraits Manet made of Morisot between their meeting in 1868 and her marriage to his brother in 1874.
Boating
Édouard Manet · 1874
Boating. A man and a woman in a sailboat on summer water, the mast cutting the canvas diagonally and the river dissolving into flat blue strokes; painted in 1874 at Gennevilliers, and often cited as his closest approach to Impressionist brushwork.
The Execution of Emperor Maximilian
Édouard Manet · 1867
The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. The firing squad at the moment the smoke cuts the Emperor of Mexico from his supporters, a contemporary history painted from newspaper reports; Manet made three large versions, an oil sketch and a lithograph of the subject between 1867 and 1869.
More to discover
The Reading
Édouard Manet · 1865
Musée d'Orsay
The Reading. Suzanne Leenhoff, his wife, sits in white while their son Léon reads aloud beside her on the grass; shown at one of the solo exhibitions Manet mounted in his own studio in 1880.
Suzanne Manet Playing the Piano
Édouard Manet · 1867
Musée d'Orsay
Suzanne Manet Playing the Piano. A portrait of his wife at the keyboard she mastered; a pianist born in the Netherlands who had played Wagner to Baudelaire in his last illness, Suzanne Leenhoff had come to the household as the children's piano teacher and married the painter in 1863.
Madame Manet in the Conservatory
Édouard Manet · 1879
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design
Madame Manet in the Conservatory. Suzanne in the glass light of a greenhouse, her hands folded, a railing and a bed of flowers making the picture's quiet pattern; painted in 1879 and reluctantly sold by the artist's widow sixteen years later, when money pressed.
L'Asperge
Édouard Manet · 1880
Musée d'Orsay
L'Asperge. One asparagus on a marble slab, sent to the collector Charles Ephrussi with a joke: Ephrussi had paid a thousand francs for a bundle of asparagus commissioned at eight hundred, and Manet painted him the missing sprig.
Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé
Édouard Manet · 1876
Musée d'Orsay
Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé. The poet at ease on a couch, cigar in hand, sunk in contemplation; the two men met in 1873 and were together almost every day for the painter's remaining decade, and contemporaries took the portrait for a true likeness.
Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet
Édouard Manet · 1860
Musée d'Orsay
Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet. His father and mother in the sitting room, the father stern in black, the mother in cap and shawl turning from her book; his first Salon season of 1861 hung it alongside The Spanish Singer.
Clair de lune sur le port de Boulogne
Édouard Manet · 1869
Musée d'Orsay
Clair de lune sur le port de Boulogne. Boats at a quay under a high moon, lamplight doubling on wet stone and one bright window; research has shown it was painted about midnight in August 1868 from a hotel window at Boulogne-sur-Mer, and its night shadows owe a debt to Rembrandt.
Lola de Valence
Édouard Manet · 1862
Musée d'Orsay
Lola de Valence. A Spanish dancer in the flounced dress of her troupe, caught between ballet and flamenco; the Salon of 1863 rejected it with the Déjeuner, and the state acquired it in 1911.
Antonin Proust
Édouard Manet · 1880
Toledo Museum of Art
Antonin Proust. The journalist and politician who was Manet's friend from their schooldays and later, as minister of the fine arts, the friend in government; painted in 1880.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Édouard Manet”
- Wikipedia, “Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe”
- Wikipedia, “The Balcony (Manet)”
- Wikipedia, “Music in the Tuileries”
- Wikipedia, “The Fifer”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of Émile Zola”
- Wikipedia, “Olympia (Manet)”
- Wikipedia, “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian”
- Wikipedia, “Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets”
- Wikipedia, “Boating (Manet)”
- Wikipedia, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”
- Wikipedia, “The Reading (Manet)”
- Wikipedia, “Madame Manet at the Piano”
- Wikipedia, “Madame Manet in the Conservatory”
- Wikipedia, “A Sprig of Asparagus”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé”
- Wikipedia, “Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Manet”
- Wikipedia, “The Port of Boulogne by Moonlight”
- Wikipedia, “Lola de Valence”
- Wikipedia, “Antonin Proust”
- Wikipedia, “Suzanne Manet”
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