Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 into a prosperous, politically connected family, and died on 30 April 1883. Between 1850 and 1856 he trained under Thomas Couture, an apprenticeship that gave him a thorough grounding in academic technique even as he moved decisively away from its conventions. His mature work — marked by visible, rapid brushwork, flattened forms, stark tonal contrasts, and an insistence on contemporary Parisian subjects — placed him at the center of one of the most consequential ruptures in the history of Western painting. Works such as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, both completed in 1863 and now held at the Musée d'Orsay, generated intense controversy at the Salon: the former for placing a naked woman among clothed men in an abruptly constructed, spatially ambiguous setting that quoted earlier art while refusing its authority; the latter for the directness of its gaze, its flattened forms, and its transformation of the traditional reclining nude into an unmistakably contemporary Parisian subject. The French government recognized his standing by decorating him as Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1881, the same year he completed A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, now at the Courtauld Gallery in London, a final major painting whose mirror reflection constructs a deliberate spatial contradiction linking performance, labor, consumption, and the instability of looking.

Manet's circle of advocates was distinguished. The critic and novelist Émile Zola was among his earliest and most forceful defenders, and Manet painted his portrait in 1868 — a canvas now at the Musée d'Orsay that incorporates Japanese prints, Spanish painting, and reproductions of Manet's own work, making the studio and the act of looking central to the image. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel began acquiring his work in 1872 and played a significant role in bringing it to broader collector and institutional attention. Antonin Proust, a childhood friend who later served as a French minister, remained closely connected to the artist throughout his life. Other key works from these years include The Railway of 1873, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets of 1872, at the Musée d'Orsay, a portrait of concentrated psychological intensity achieved through a dark ground, luminous face, and deliberately rapid surface.

The reach of Manet's posthumous exhibition history reflects the breadth of his influence. A solo presentation at the Avenue de l'Alma in Paris in 1867 was followed by a memorial exhibition at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1884, a retrospective at the Autumn Salon in Paris in 1905, and subsequent solo and group exhibitions across Europe and North America spanning more than a century. Institutions including the Musée d'Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museo Nacional del Prado, and MoMA have each devoted focused exhibitions to his work or to specific aspects of it — his prints and etchings, his engagement with the sea, his portraiture, his dialogue with Velázquez and Goya, and his relationship with Edgar Degas, most recently examined in the 2023 exhibition Manet/Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Scholarship on his work is anchored by the two-volume catalogue raisonné published by Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein in 1975, which remains the primary reference for authentication alongside provenance research and specialist curatorial assessment.