Manet, Édouard

Early life and works.

Although his father wanted him to enroll in law school, Édouard could not be persuaded to do so. When his father refused to allow him to become a painter, he applied for the naval college but failed the entrance examination. He therefore embarked in December 1848 as an apprentice pilot on a transport vessel.

Upon his return to France in June 1849, he failed the naval examination a second time, and his parents now finally yielded to their son's stubborn determination to become a painter. In 1850 Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture, a classical painter who was not a bad teacher. "I may not claim to train geniuses," he said to his pupils, "but at least I train painters to know their craft." Little as his teacher may have understood him, Manet was to owe to Couture a good grasp of drawing and pictorial technique.

In 1856, after six years with Couture, Manet set up a studio which he shared with Albert de Balleroy, a painter of military subjects. There he painted "The Boy with Cherries" (c. 1858) before moving to another studio where he painted "The Absinthe Drinker" (1859; Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen). In 1856 he made short trips to Holland, Germany, and Italy. Meanwhile, at the Louvre he copied paintings by Titian and Diego Velázquez and in 1857 made the acquaintance of Henri Fantin-Latour, who was later to paint Manet's portrait.

Manet also met the poet Charles Baudelaire, at whose suggestion he painted "La Musique aux Tuileries" (1862; "Concert in the Tuileries Gardens," National Gallery, London), a picture painted outdoors, in which, it seems, the whole of Paris of the Second Empire is assembled--a smart, frivolous society composed chiefly of habitués of the Café Tortoni and of the Café Guerbois, the latter the rendezvous of the Batignolles artists. Passersby looked with curiosity at this elegantly dressed painter who set up his canvas and painted in the open air. In 1861 Manet exhibited at the Salon "Spanish Singer" (1860; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), dubbed "Guitarero" by the French man of letters Théophile Gautier, who praised it enthusiastically in the periodical Le Moniteur universel. In 1862 he exhibited "Lola de Valence" (Orsay Museum, Paris).(See "Concert in the Tuileries Gardens,".)

Mature life and works.

In 1863 Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutchwoman who had given him piano lessons and had subsequently had an illegitimate child by him. Manet began to frequent the racetrack, where he skillfully took up the theme of his friend Edgar Degas, who in his studies of the turf had preceded him by two years. Of the several pictures he painted on this subject, "The Races at Longchamp, Paris" (1864; Art Institute of Chicago) is the major work. (See horse racing.)

At the Salon of 1865, "Olympia" (now in the Orsay Museum), painted two years earlier, created a scandal. The subject of this painting is a reclining female nude gazing brazenly at the viewer and depicted in a harsh, brilliant light that obliterates interior modeling and turns her into an almost two-dimensional figure. This symphony in white--which the French statesman Georges Clemenceau was to install in the Louvre in 1907--was called indecent. In his vexation, Manet left in August 1865 for Spain, but, disliking the food and frustrated by his total lack of knowledge of the language, he did not stay long. In Madrid he met Théodore Duret, who was later to be one of the first connoisseurs and champions of his work. The following year, "The Fifer" (1866; Orsay Museum), having been rejected by the Salon jury under the pretext that its modeling was flat, was displayed along with others in Manet's studio in Paris.

When a large number of his works were rejected for the Universal Exposition of 1867, Manet, in imitation of Gustave Courbet, who had had the same idea, had a stall erected at the corner of the Place de l'Alma and the Avenue Montaigne, and there in May he exhibited a group of works, including his paintings of toreadors and bullfights. He showed about 50 paintings, but these were hardly received any more favourably than before. During the late 1860s his work was varied in character, but in general it seems to represent a greater concern with close relations of tone and with complexities of illumination and atmosphere and sometimes exhibits a freedom of handling comparable to that in "La Musique aux Tuileries." "The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico" (1867) and "The Departure of the Folkestone Boat" (1869) are representative of the work Manet was producing at this time.

Much taken by the naturalism of Manet's work, the young novelist Émile Zola undertook to praise it in a long and courageous article published in the Revue du XIX^e siècle of Jan. 1, 1867. In the face of the hostility of the public, Zola saw Manet as representative of all artists of importance who begin by offending public opinion. Manet's gratitude was to be expressed in his portrait of Zola shown at the Salon of 1868 (and now at the Orsay Museum). Along with his portrait of Zola, Manet exhibited "The Balcony" (1869; Orsay Museum), in which there appeared for the first time--in the figure of the Spanish girl seated with her elbow on the railing--a portrait of Berthe Morisot, whom he had met at the Louvre. From then on, Morisot, who was to become one of the leading female French Impressionists, was a frequent visitor to Manet's studio. He painted a series of portraits of her, until her marriage to his brother Eugène Manet.

After the praise published by Zola, Duret, and the art critic Louis-Édmond Duranty, Manet received, at the Salon of 1870, Fantin-Latour's homage in paint--"The Studio in the Batignolles" (Orsay Museum), a kind of manifesto on his behalf. This large canvas shows him painting, surrounded by those who were his defenders at the time: Zola, the painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Frédéric Bazille, and the sculptor Zacharie Astruc. The painting was caricatured in the Journal amusant under the title "Jesus Painting Among His Disciples."

During the Franco-German War (1870-71) Manet served as a staff lieutenant in the National Guard and witnessed the siege of Paris. In February 1871 he rejoined his family, returning to Paris shortly before the Commune. His studio there was half-destroyed, but he had taken care to store his canvases in a safe place, and these he found intact. The art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought almost everything that Manet's studio contained, paying 50,000 francs in the currency of the time. From about this time on Manet and his friends met at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, which had replaced the Guerbois. In 1872 he visited Holland, where he became much influenced by the works of Frans Hals. As a result he painted "Le Bon Bock" (1873; Philadelphia Museum of Art), which achieved considerable success at the Salon exhibition of 1873.

Later life and works.

In "Nana" (1877; Hamburger Kunsthalle) Manet gave the visual version of the harlot theme touched on by Zola in his novel L'Assommoir; and in that same year he painted "The Plum," one of his major works, in which a solitary woman rests her elbow on the marble top of a café table. These were followed by "The Blonde with Bare Breasts" (1878; Orsay Museum), in which the pearl-white flesh tones gleam with light; and "Chez le Père Lathuille" (1879; Museum of Fine Arts, Tournai), one of Manet's major works, the setting of which is a restaurant near the Café Guerbois in Clichy. It shows a coquette somewhat past her prime having lunch with her young lover. From then on, Manet did a large number of pastels. In broad, determined strokes he captured the features of George Moore (1879; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), an Irish poet who often came to join Manet and Degas at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes.

In 1880 Manet had a one-man exhibition at the offices of the periodical La Vie moderne, but his legs were already affected by a malady that was to prove fatal. In 1881 he rented a villa at Versailles, and on his return to Paris he painted "Jeanne," or "Spring" (1882), the delightful profile posed by the actress Jeanne de Marsy. But his illness was making alarming progress. The following year he went to stay in a villa at Rueil. He took part in an important exhibition of French art that was held in London at Burlington House, and at the Salon showed "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882; Courtauld Institute Galleries, London [see photograph]), his last great composition. On April 6, 1883, after painting some roses and lilacs, Manet had to take to his bed. Gangrene broke out in his left leg, which was subsequently amputated. He died not long after and was buried in the cemetery of Passy.

In January 1884 a posthumous exhibition was held in the Salle de Melpomène of the École des Beaux-Arts. True to his admiration for the artist, Émile Zola wrote the preface to the catalog. It was after this memorial exhibition that his paintings began to gain prominence. In the same year, the price of Manet's pictures began to rise, and his stature in the art world was assured.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica Online