Édouard Manet painted the Paris of his own day, its picnics, its models and its bars, plainly and without the polish his age expected. Born in the city on January 23, 1832, he died there on April 30, 1883, at 51.
He is often called the father of modern art. Two of his paintings, Luncheon on the Grass, shown in 1863, and Olympia, shown in 1865, made him the most mocked artist in France. The Impressionists looked up to him, yet he never exhibited with them.
All his life he wanted the approval of the Salon, the official art exhibition run by the state in Paris, whose jury could make or break a painter. Yet the pictures that made his name are the ones that outraged its visitors, and Manet, who was no rebel by temperament, suffered from every insult.
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That need for approval began at home. His father, Auguste, was a senior official at the Ministry of Justice, and he expected his eldest son to follow him into the law. The boy filled his school notebooks with drawings instead.
An uncle on his mother's side took him to the Louvre and paid for a drawing course. His father would not hear of a career in painting, so Manet tried the next respectable path and sat the entrance exam for the naval training school.
He failed. Candidates could try again after a voyage at sea, and in December 1848, at sixteen, Manet shipped out as an apprentice seaman, a trainee pilot, on a cargo ship bound for Rio de Janeiro.
He came home in June 1849, sat the exam a second time and was turned away again. After two rejections his parents gave up on the navy and let him train as a painter.
In 1850 he entered the studio of Thomas Couture, a successful painter in the official style taught at the Academy of Fine Arts, with smooth, polished surfaces and grand scenes from history. Manet wanted the clothes and faces he saw in the street, and the two argued constantly.
What Manet valued was the Louvre, where he spent hours copying Titian and Velázquez. He stayed with Couture for six years all the same, and left in 1856 to open his own studio.
A ragpicker the jury refused
In 1859, three years after leaving Couture, he finished The Absinthe Drinker, the first large picture he had painted on his own, about 1.8 meters tall. He sent it to the Salon that spring, and the jury's answer set the pattern for his whole career.
What You'll Discover
What the jury saw in a ragpicker.
What the picnic was copied from.
Who the woman on the bed really was.
What became of a censored canvas.
Whose son Léon most likely was.
Why surgeons took his leg.