Édouard Manet was a French artist, who represented Realism and Impressionism. A key person in the transition between these art movements, he became well-known for his faithful depiction, without sentimentalization, of contemporary middle-class life. Luncheon on the Grass, Olympia and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère are among the most famous of his canvases.
Background
Édouard Manet was born on January 23, 1832 in Paris, France, to an upper-middle-class family of Auguste Manet, a judge and civil servant, and Eugénie Désirée Fournier, a diplomat's daughter.
Manet had two younger brothers, Eugène and Gustave.
Education
Having a bourgeois upbringing, Édouard Manet experienced all the pros and cons of this environment, from financial comfort to social conservatism.
In 1839, Manet began to attend Canon Poiloup's school in Vaugirard, where he studied French and classics. From 1844 to 1848, he was a boarder at the Collège Rollin (currently the Collège-lycée Jacques-Decour), then situated near the Panthéon.
Being passioned about art from the early childhood, Manet had little interest in other subjects except the special drawing course, offered by the school. Following the advice of his uncle, Edmond Fournier, who was the one to encourage his artistic passion, Manet joined one of such courses at the school, where he met a future Minister for Fine Arts, Antonin Proust, who would become his lifelong friend.
Having failed the entrance examination for the naval college for the first time, Manet followed the suggestion of his father, who insisted on his son's career in law, and became an apprentice pilot on a transport vessel in December 1848. A year later, he failed the second entrance examination to the Navy, and his father finally softened his position and allowed him to fulfill his artistic goals.
In 1850, Manet enrolled at the studio of a classic painter, Thomas Couture, and studied under him for the following six years. He practiced making copies of the Old Masters in the Louvre in his leisure time. He also traveled to Germany, Italy and the Netherlands during this period, and discovered the art of such masters, as Frans Hals, Diego Velázquez and Francisco José de Goya.
The start of Édouard Manet's career can be counted from 1856, when he established his own painting studio together with his colleague, Albert de Balleroy, an artist, who worked with military subjects. Manet's paintings of the period, like The Boy with Cherries (about 1858), stood out for the loose brush strokes, simple details and the absence of transitional tones.
Influenced by Realism through the works of Gustave Courbet, Manet produced The Absinthe Drinker and a number of canvases, which depicted everyday objects and scenes of the Parisian streets with gypsies, singers, Parisian cafés and bullfights. The artist continued to visit the Louvre, copying the art of Titian and Diego Velázquez and made short trips to the Netherlands, Germany and Italy at that time. He got acquainted with an artist Henri Fantin-Latour and a poet Charles Baudelaire.
The Salon of 1861 accepted Manet's Spanish Singer, praised by Théophile Gautier in the periodical Le Moniteur universel. Two years later, one of his canvases, which would become his most well-known work, Le Déjeuner sur L'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), was rejected by the jury, probably because of its entirely revolutionary technique. Manet demonstrated it at the alternative exhibition, called the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected). From 1862 to 1865, the artist took part in the exhibitions, organized by the Martinet Gallery.
Another work by Édouard Manet, that featured nude again (a model Victorine Meurent), Olympia, caused a scandal at the Salon of 1865. Quite frustrated, the artist traveled to Spain, where he didn't stay for long, however, disliking the local food and having problems with the language. While in Madrid, Manet met Théodore Duret, who would later become one of the first admirers and proponents of his work. The following year, The Fife Player, after having been set aside by the Salon on the pretext, that its modeling was flat, was demonstrated along with others at Manet's Parisian studio.
In 1867, when many of his canvases weren't accepted by the Universal Exposition, Édouard Manet followed the example of Courbet and erected a tent at the corner of the Place de l'Alma and the Avenue Montaigne, where in May of that year he exhibited about 50 works, including his paintings of toreadors and bullfights. The canvases were't received well again. However, Émile Zola and Théodore Duret published positive reviews on his art, and an artist Henri Fatin-Latour paid homage to his colleague through a painting A Studio at Batignolles, which depicted Manet in the company of Monet, Zola, Bazille and Renoir, among others.
At the outbreak of the Franco-German War in 1870, unlike some of his friends, including Monet, who escaped to London, Édouard Manet joined the National Guard, where he served as a staff lieutenant during the conflict. Manet found his studio half-destroyed upon his return to Paris in 1871. Almost all the contents of the studio was purchased by the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who paid the artist 50,000 francs in the currency of the time. As the studio was destroyed, Manet and his friends met at the Café Nouvelle-Athènes, which had replaced Café Guerbois. In 1872, the painter made a trip to the Netherlands, where he explored the art of Frans Hals. Le Bon Bock (The Good Point), produced after the trip, was successfully met at the Salon of 1873.
The following year, Manet produced a number of canvases, depicting or referencing his friend, impressionist Claude Monet, including a luminous plein-air Boating and Monet Painting on his Studio Boat. Although Manet was close to impressionists, he didn't participate in their shows, preferring the official Salon. In 1875, two of his canvases, The Artist and Laundry, were again rejected at the exhibition, and he showed them at his own studio. Nana, L'Assommmoir (The Drunkard), Plum Brandy, The Blonde with Bare Breasts, Chez le Père Lathuille, as well as a large number of pastels followed.
In 1880, when Édouard Manet had a solo show at the offices of La Vie Moderne (Modern Life) periodical, he already suffered from the disease, that affected his legs. At the end of his life, the artist concentrated on small-scale still lifes of fruits and vegetables, like Bunch of Asparagus or The Lemon (both produced in 1880). A year before his death, Manet exhibited at the show, dedicated to French art, in Burlington House, London, and presented A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, his last major work, at the Salon.
Young Woman Taking a Walk Holding an Open Umbrella
Boy Carrying a Sword
The Jetty at Boulogne
Polichinelle
Gypsy with a Cigarette
The Rest
Bouquet of Violets
A Parisian Lady
Effect of Snow on Petit-Montrouge
A Veiled Young Woman
The Grand Canal
The Grand Canal of Venice
Head of a Dog
A King Charles Spaniel
A Boy with a Dog
Still Life with Melon and Peaches
Peonies in a Vase
Basket of Fruits
White Lilacs in a Glass Vase
Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase
Manet's Mother in the Garden at Bellevue
The Plum
Religion
Édouard Manet was raised a Catholic by his aristocratic family. He was a religious person and painted a lot of religious scenes until the discussion on the topic of religion with Charles Baudelaire. After that, Manet never showed interest in religion.
Politics
Édouard Manet never was a member of any French political party. However, he was a French patriot. He took part in the Franco-German War (1870-1871), serving as the staff lieutenant in the French National Guard.
Views
Manet was both a realist in life and realist as a painter. He thought, that people had to accept the reality of the world as it is, and that is the reason he painted all the aspects of the French society during his painting career.
Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many of the scandals he provoked.
Quotations:
"I paint what I see and not what others like to see."
"There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug."
"There are no lines in nature, only areas of color, one against another."
"A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds... You know, I should like to be the Saint Francis of still life."
"No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else."
"You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real."
"It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more."
Personality
Édouard Manet was a very melancholic and depressed person. It was caused by the childish traumas, provoked by his aristocratic parents, who tried to make him the person he wasn't. His creativeness and painting were the only things, that helped him to cope with depression.
Physical Characteristics:
Édouard Manet was of average build and height. The long bushy beard and mustache were his trademarks. He had deep-set brown eyes and brown thick hair, but he was baldish at the corners of his forehead.
At the end of his life, Manet suffered from a disease, that affected his legs, which became partially paralysed. Shortly before his death, his left leg was amputated.
Quotes from others about the person
Beatrice Farwell, art historian: "[Manet] has been universally regarded as the Father of Modernism. With Courbet, he was among the first to take serious risks with the public, whose favour he sought, the first to make alla prima painting the standard technique for oil painting and one of the first to take liberties with Renaissance perspective and to offer 'pure painting' as a source of aesthetic pleasure. He was a pioneer, again with Courbet, in the rejection of humanistic and historical subject-matter, and shared with Degas the establishment of modern urban life as acceptable material for high art."
Edmond de Goncourt, writer: "With Manet, whose techniques are lifted from Goya, with Manet and all the painters, who have followed him, what we have is the death of oil painting, that's to say, of painting with a pretty, amber, crystalline transparency, of which Rubens's Woman in a Straw Hat is the epitome. Now we have opaque painting, matt painting, chalky painting, painting with all the characteristics of furniture paint. And everyone's doing it like that, from Raffaelli to the last little Impressionist dauber."
Interests
reading, music
Artists
Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, Frans Hals
Connections
Édouard Manet started a romantic relationship with Suzanne Leenhoff, a piano teacher, hired by his father, in about 1849. Three years later, Leenhoff gave birth to a boy, Leon Koella Leenhoff, who, brought up in Suzanne's family to avoid scandal, was presented to other people as her younger brother and Manet's godson. Manet married Leenhoff in 1863, a year after his father's death.
Manet: Portraying Life
The book, published to accompany an important traveling exhibition, explores Manet's stylistic evolution in the context of his portraiture.
2012
Édouard Manet
The readers will learn about Manet's life and work, including Monet in His Floating Studio, a painting, featuring Manet's friend, the artist Claude Monet.
Édouard Manet
Addressed to nonspecialist art historians, students and the wider public, the book examines Manet's work in the light of extensive research and in the context of thought and events contemporary with the artist.
1993
Manet
The book recounts the life and career of Manet, explains why his work was considered so controversial and shows examples of his paintings.
1959
Édouard Manet
A book by Jean Laran, Georges Le Bas and Louis Hourticq.