Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

In the following spring, he won a second-class medal at the Salon for his portrait of Henri Rochefort, and in the fall he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

He continued to work until his death in April 1883. Berthe Morisot survived him until she died in 1895, also in Paris. They were buried in the same grave at the Passy Cemetery in Paris.

Edouard Manet (1832-1883)

Edouard Manet was a French painter and printmaker, whose work inspired the Impressionist style, but who refused to identify his own work with Impressionism. He is considered by many art historians to be the father of Modernism.

Manet was born in Paris on January 23, 1832, to an upper-class Parisian family. His mother, Eugenie-Desiree Fournier, was the goddaughter of a Swedish prince, and his father, Auguste Manet, was a magistrate and judge who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps in the Ministry of Justice, but His uncle, Charles Fournier, encouraged Edouard to be a painter and to pursue painting seriously.

To avoid studying law, as his father wished, he went to sea. However, after twice failing the entrance exam to become a naval officer, he instead went to Paris where he studied art from 1850 to 1856 under Thomas Couture, a well-respected academic painter. His real artistic education was gained, however, through studying and copying the works of the Old Masters in the Louvre and on extensive travels to some of the great galleries of Europe. An ironic fact is that, although he was often attacked for the modernity of his ideas, few artists of his time showed such dedication to the great art of the past. The works of Frans Hals, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya were the principal influences on his art.

His far-reaching influence on French painting and the general development of modern art was due to his portrayal of everyday subject matter, his use of broad, simple colour areas and a vivid, bold brush technique that made him an inspiration to the Impressionists. Manet began to paint genre (everyday) subjects, such as old beggars, street urchins, café characters, and Spanish bullfight scenes. He produced very few religious, mythological, or historical paintings.

Many of his earliest paintings explored the darker side of Parisian life in paintings such as The Absinthe Drinker (1858) and Old Musician (1862). His loose handling of his brushstrokes and his subject matter was very different from the highly-finished canvasses approved by the academy and exhibited in the Salon. His work has been aligned to that of Degas and the Impressionists, but the comparison has less to do with colour and technique and more to do with his rebellion against academic painting.

In 1862 his father died and he inherited a fortune. Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863.

Initially, Manet believed that an artist's success depended on acceptance by the Salon. The biennial (and later, annual) Parisian Salons were considered the most expedient way for an artist to make himself known to the public, and Manet submitted paintings to Salon juries throughout his career. In 1861, at the age of twenty-nine, he was awarded the Salon's honourable mention for The Spanish Singer.

However, his hopes for continued early success were dashed at the subsequent Salon of 1863, when more than half of the submissions to the official Salon were rejected, including Manet's own.

In order to sooth the public outcry, Napoleon III ordered the formation of a Salon des Refusés in which Manet exhibited three paintings, including the scandalous Déjeuner sur L'herbe. The public expressed shock and was bitterly opposed to the subject of a nude woman blithely enjoying a picnic in the company of two fully clothed men, while a second, scantily clad woman bathes in a nearby stream. While critics recognized that this scene of modern-day debauchery was, to a certain degree, an updated version of Titian's Concert champêtre, Manet's painting style was attacked ruthlessly.

In 1864, Manet's submissions to the Salon were again condemned by critics, who found errors of perspective in his Incident at a Bullfight and a lack of decorum in The Dead Christ and the Angels. The latter painting was censured for its realistic touches, such as the cadaverous body of Christ and the seemingly human angels. Apparently the painting lacked any sense of spirituality and the figure of the battered Christ was said to more closely resemble the body of a dead coal miner than the son of God.

Despite his efforts, Manet's modern scenes remained a target of criticism throughout the decade. His Olympia was considered the most shocking work in the 1865 Salon. Its debt to Titian's Venus of Urbino only accentuated the wide gulf of public opinion towards a reclining nude woman as subject matter: a goddess was perfectly acceptable, but a contemporary prostitute awaiting her client was not.

After being rejected from the Salon of 1866 and learning that he was to be excluded from the Exposition Universelle of 1867 as well, Manet grew anxious to find an audience for his art. He used his inheritance to construct a pavilion across the street from one of the entrances to the Exposition Universelle. Inside were fifty of his pictures, including several large works like A Matador and Young Lady (Woman with a Parrot) in 1866.

Earlier that year, the artist's first champion, Émile Zola, had published a lengthy and glowing article about Manet in which he insisted that the much-maligned Déjeuner sur l'herbe (which was included in Manet's 1867 exhibition) would one day hang in the Louvre. Zola's words eventually proved to be prophetic. Although it took almost seventy years, the painting entered the collection of the Louvre in 1934.

By all accounts, the sociable Manet was on good terms with many of his peers even though he himself did not consider himself an Impressionist and did not approve of their opposition to the official salon system. However, he was influenced by the Impressionists, especially by Morisot whom he befriended in 1868 and fell in love with, but since he was already married, she became the wife of his brother Ernest in 1874.

Manet was influenced to use lighter colours and paint areas of light and dark. He painted many plein air (ouitdoor) studies, but always returned to what he considered serious work in the studio. The closest he came to working in the Impressionistic style is in the works En Plein Air Argenteuil and Monet's Boat Studio which he created while with Monet in Argenteuil in 1874. He had met Edgar Degas in 1859, when they both copied paintings at the Louvre and he spoke with countless others during the now-famous evening gatherings at the Café Guerbois.

By 1874, Manet was firmly established as the leader of the Impressionists. Although he declined invitations to participate in any of the eight exhibitions organized by the group, his studio was the gathering place for the young rebels of the Impressionist style, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Degas and Pissarro.

Faced by declining health towards the end of the decade, Manet rented a villa in the Parisian suburb of Bellevue where he hoped to recuperate with the aid of hydropathic treatment. Here, in the garden of the house, he painted several plein air pictures which included one view of the garden without figures, a painting of Madame Auguste Manet seen in profile and his last portrait of his wife, the Dutch-born pianist Suzanne Leenhoff.

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