The admired elder of the independents — he painted beside Monet, befriended Morisot, and refused to show in all eight of the group's exhibitions.
Édouard Manet was a French painter whose work broke the rules of official French art in the 1860s and opened the way for Impressionism. He was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 and died there on 30 April 1883.
Two paintings caused the break. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, shown in 1863, puts a naked woman at a picnic with two fully dressed men, looking straight out at the viewer. Olympia, painted the same year and shown in 1865, is a nude prostitute on a bed, propped up and staring at whoever is looking at her.
Both provoked scandals. Nudes were accepted in French painting as long as they were goddesses or slaves in some other time and place. Manet's women were contemporary Parisians who looked straight out at the viewer.
He was older than the Impressionists, refused to exhibit with them, and painted in black, which they had abandoned. They regarded him as their leader anyway.
Édouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 into a prosperous family. His father, Auguste, was a senior official at the Ministry of Justice and later a judge; his mother, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and goddaughter of a Swedish crown prince.[1]
His father wanted him in the law. Manet failed the naval examination twice and, between attempts, sailed to Rio de Janeiro as a trainee on a merchant ship — six months at sea that gave him his first serious drawing practice.
After the second failure his father gave in, and in 1850 Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture, a successful academic painter, where he stayed for six years and argued constantly with his teacher about what a picture was for.[2]
Manet spent years in the Louvre copying Velázquez, Titian and Frans Hals, and travelled to Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands to look at paintings.
Spanish painting was the decisive influence. Velázquez taught him a way of putting a figure against a plain dark background with almost no modelling, and Goya gave him subjects. The flat handling that later looked like incompetence to Salon critics came out of that study.[3]
In 1863 the Salon jury rejected an unusually large number of pictures, and the emperor Napoleon III ordered a separate exhibition of the refused works, the Salon des Refusés.[4]
Manet showed Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe there. Two men in modern dress sit on the grass in a wood, talking. Beside them a naked woman sits and looks out of the picture at the viewer. A second woman bathes in the background, out of scale with the rest.
The composition came from a Renaissance engraving after Raphael, and the subject of a nude in a landscape was centuries old. What offended was the modern clothing, the picnic litter, and the woman's direct unembarrassed look, which turned an academic convention into a scene the viewer had apparently walked in on.[5]
Olympia, painted in 1863 and shown at the Salon of 1865, is a young woman lying naked on a bed, wearing a black ribbon at her throat, a bracelet, an orchid in her hair and one slipper. A Black maid brings her a bouquet from a client. A black cat stands at her feet.[6]
The pose is taken directly from Titian's Venus of Urbino, painted around 1534. The difference is that Titian's woman is a goddess and Manet's is a Paris prostitute, painted in flat harsh light, entirely unashamed, looking at the viewer as at a customer.
The Salon crowd was outraged. The painting had to be rehung high and guarded because people tried to attack it with sticks and umbrellas. Reviewers called the model dirty, corpse-like and yellow.[6]
The model was Victorine Meurent, nineteen when she posed for it, who sat for many of his major paintings and who was a painter herself; she exhibited at the Salon in 1876, a year when Manet's own submission was refused.[7]
In 1890 Claude Monet organised a public subscription to buy Olympia from Manet's widow and give it to the French state. It hangs today at the Musée d'Orsay.[6]
The young painters who became the Impressionists — Monet, Renoir, Degas, Berthe Morisot — treated Manet as the leader of the new painting from the mid-1860s. Monet, Renoir and Degas met him at the Café Guerbois, where he held court most evenings. Berthe Morisot met him at the Louvre in 1868.
He refused to exhibit with them. When they organised their independent exhibitions from 1874, Manet declined every invitation and kept submitting to the official Salon, which he went on wanting to conquer rather than replace.[8]
Their influence on him was real all the same. From about 1870 his palette lightened and he worked outdoors more. Boating and Argenteuil, both from 1874, use Impressionist colour and outdoor light. Berthe Morisot, who exhibited with the group, married his brother Eugène in 1874. Manet painted her fourteen times. She posed for The Balcony, made in 1868 and 1869 and shown at the Salon of 1869, seated at the front left of the composition, and for Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets in 1872. She was never his student, and the influence between the two painters ran in both directions. When she died in 1895 she was buried beside him and Eugène in the Passy cemetery. The violets portrait and The Balcony both hang at the Musée d'Orsay.
From the late 1860s the gatherings at the Café Guerbois, on the avenue de Clichy in the Batignolles quarter, centered on Manet. The circle is sometimes called the Batignolles group, and its regulars included:[9]
When the group organized its own exhibition in 1874, Manet declined the invitation, and he kept declining through all eight of the independent exhibitions the Impressionists mounted. He continued to submit to the official Salon, and stayed close to the painters he would not hang beside. He was among the friends who gathered at Monet's homes and gardens and often painted alongside his host, and Renoir counted him among his friends.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted in 1882 and hung at that year's Salon, is his last major work. A barmaid stands behind a marble counter with bottles, oranges and flowers in front of her, facing out, expressionless, in a packed music hall.
Behind her is a huge mirror, and the reflection does not work. Her reflected back appears far to the right, where it could not be, and a customer stands in front of her in the reflection who is not in front of her in the room. The distortion is deliberate, and art historians still disagree about why he made it.
He painted A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in his studio, from a real barmaid named Suzon who worked there, with a bar reconstructed around her.[5]
Manet contracted syphilis, probably in his twenties, and it went untreated. From about 1879 he had increasing pain and difficulty walking, caused by locomotor ataxia, a late effect of the disease that destroys coordination.
He kept working, moving to smaller pictures — flowers, fruit, portraits in pastel — as standing at a large canvas became impossible.
In April 1883 his left foot became gangrenous and the leg was amputated. He died eleven days later, on 30 April 1883, aged fifty-one. He is buried in Passy cemetery in Paris.[2]
Manet made modern life a subject fit for serious painting, and he did it by taking the old compositions and putting contemporary Parisians into them. That is why the scandals happened: the pictures made viewers aware that they were looking at a painting, and at a person who was looking back.
His break with academic technique was as important as his break with academic subjects. He painted with flat areas of colour and abrupt tonal jumps, refusing the smooth gradations academic training required, and he kept black as a colour when the Impressionists dropped it. Painters from Degas to Matisse took that flatness as a starting point, which is why Manet is usually placed at the front of modern painting rather than inside Impressionism.
Born in Paris on 23 January into a prosperous family. His father is a senior official at the Ministry of Justice and later a judge.
Fails the naval examination and sails to Rio de Janeiro as a trainee on a merchant ship, drawing throughout the six-month voyage.
Fails the naval examination a second time. His father gives up on a naval or legal career for him.
Enters the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture, where he stays six years and argues constantly with his teacher.
His son Léon is born to Suzanne Leenhoff, the family's piano teacher. The boy is raised as her younger brother.
Travels in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands looking at paintings, and copies Velázquez, Titian and Frans Hals in the Louvre.
Leaves Couture's studio and sets up on his own.
Submits The Absinthe Drinker to the Salon. It is rejected.
Has two paintings accepted by the Salon, including a portrait of his parents.
Paints Music in the Tuileries, a crowd of contemporary Parisians, and meets the model Victorine Meurent.
Shows Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe at the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of rejected works ordered by Napoleon III. It causes a scandal. Marries Suzanne Leenhoff.
Paints Olympia, a Paris prostitute in the pose of Titian's Venus of Urbino.
Shows Olympia at the Salon. It has to be rehung high and guarded after visitors try to attack it. Travels to Spain and sees Velázquez in the Prado.
Émile Zola defends him in print, and the two become friends.
Holds a private exhibition of fifty works in a pavilion he pays for himself, outside the Exposition Universelle.
Paints Zola's portrait, with one of Zola's own pamphlets on the desk. Meets Berthe Morisot.
Serves in the National Guard during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War.
The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel buys about thirty of his paintings, the first substantial money he has made.
Declines to join the Impressionists' first independent exhibition, and goes on submitting to the official Salon. Paints alongside Monet at Argenteuil that summer, and his palette lightens.
Berthe Morisot marries his brother Eugène.
The Salon refuses his submissions, and he opens his studio to the public in protest. Victorine Meurent exhibits at the same Salon.
Paints Nana, which the Salon refuses.
Begins to suffer pain and difficulty walking, caused by locomotor ataxia, a late effect of untreated syphilis.
Is awarded the Legion of Honour, the official recognition he had wanted for twenty years.
Paints A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, his last major work, in the studio with a bar reconstructed around a real barmaid.
His left foot becomes gangrenous and the leg is amputated in April.
Dies in Paris on 30 April, eleven days after the amputation, aged fifty-one. He is buried in Passy cemetery.
A memorial exhibition of his work is held at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Olympia is bought for the French state by public subscription, organised by Claude Monet, and enters the Musée du Luxembourg.
Olympia is moved to the Louvre.
Painting · Modern life in Paris
A crowd stands and sits under chestnut trees in the Tuileries Gardens, waiting for one of the twice-weekly concerts given there. Édouard Manet put his friends and his own family into the throng and left most of the other faces as thick dabs of paint. Émile Zola, who saw it on show in 1863, counted perhaps a hundred people in it. The painting was Manet's first large picture of contemporary Paris, and it never went to the Salon.
Painting · Modern life in Paris
Édouard Manet's last major painting shows a barmaid facing the viewer across a marble counter. A large mirror behind her reflects the crowded Folies-Bergère and a customer positioned at the right.
Painting · Salon des Refusés
Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe places a nude woman beside two dressed men in a wooded setting. Rejected by the official Salon in 1863, the painting was shown that year at the Salon des Refusés.
Painting · Modern life in Paris
Édouard Manet's Olympia shows a reclining nude receiving flowers from an attendant. Painted in 1863 and exhibited at the Salon in 1865, it gave a familiar pose from older art a contemporary Parisian subject.
Painting
A young woman in black looks out of a small canvas, a tall black hat on her head and a posy of violets pinned low on her chest. The woman is Berthe Morisot, a painter who would help found Impressionism two years later and who married the artist's brother Eugène Manet in 1874. The Musée d'Orsay calls the picture a composition in blacks and notes that Édouard Manet gave her black eyes, though hers were green.
Painting · Modern life in Paris
A crowd stands and sits under chestnut trees in the Tuileries Gardens, waiting for one of the twice-weekly concerts given there. Édouard Manet put his friends and his own family into the throng and left most of the other faces as thick dabs of paint. Émile Zola, who saw it on show in 1863, counted perhaps a hundred people in it. The painting was Manet's first large picture of contemporary Paris, and it never went to the Salon.
Met
The Met places Manet among the friends who gathered at Monet's homes and gardens and often painted alongside their host.
Met
Manet and Degas met in the Louvre in the early 1860s, where Degas was copying, and spent the next twenty years in a friendship that ran through the same cafés, the same Salons and the same arguments about the new painting. Degas painted Manet and his wife; Manet, unhappy with how his wife had been rendered, cut the canvas.
Met
Zola defended Manet in print in 1866, when the Salon jury had rejected him and the press was mocking Olympia. Manet painted Zola's portrait the following year, with one of Zola's own pamphlets on the writer's desk and a print of Olympia pinned to the wall behind him. The portrait was shown at the Salon of 1868 and is now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Met
The Met records the friendship plainly: Manet befriended Morisot, and she eventually married his younger brother Eugène. The Orsay catalogues her as 'Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugène Manet).'
Met
Manet's commitment to modern life shaped the circle Renoir painted in, and the Orsay names them together among the 'painters of modern life' alongside Degas, Caillebotte, and Monet; the BMJ account of Renoir's established years counts Manet among his friends.
Met · 1858–1867
Close friends through the last decade of the poet's life. Baudelaire, by then the most feared art critic in Paris, defended Manet's paintings while the Salon public was jeering them, and Manet put him in the crowd of La Musique aux Tuileries (1862). The friendship ran until Baudelaire's stroke in 1866 and his death the following year.
Met · 1863–1864
Their pictures were the twin scandals of the 1863 Salon des Refusés — Whistler's White Girl and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The following year the two posed together, with Charles Baudelaire, for Fantin-Latour's group portrait Hommage à Delacroix; Manet later introduced Whistler to the critic Théodore Duret, who helped sell his mother's portrait to France in 1891.
Édouard Manet went to the Prado in Madrid on 1 September 1865, saw the Velázquez rooms and called him the painter of painters in a letter to his friend the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. He singled out the full-length portrait of the jester Pablo de Valladolid, writing that the background disappears and air surrounds the man dressed in black. The Prado quoted Manet's words for that picture when it began restoring it in 2026.
Manet's flat handling and contemporary subjects gave the younger painters who became the Impressionists their starting point, and Monet took the modern-life subject and the loose brushwork directly. The two painted alongside each other at Argenteuil in the summer of 1874, after which Manet's own palette lightened. Monet later organised the public subscription that bought Olympia for the French state.
Art movement · 1874–1886
As the admired elder who never joined: the Met records that Manet declined invitations to this and all seven subsequent independent exhibitions, while remaining central to the circle that mounted them.
Historical period and art category · circa 1860s–1970s
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was rejected by the Salon jury in 1863 and shown at the Salon des Refusés, where its nude woman beside clothed men drew public laughter. The scandal was less about nudity, familiar in academic painting, than about a scene that refused a reassuring mythological explanation.
Manet is buried in the family tomb at Passy Cemetery, which also holds his brother Eugene Manet and Eugene's wife, the painter Berthe Morisot.
Visit the place
Manet registered as a copyist at the Louvre. He and Degas probably met in the galleries in 1859 while both were copying paintings there.
Visit the place
By the early 1870s the Nouvelle Athenes on the place Pigalle had become the meeting place for Manet, Degas and their circle, succeeding the Cafe Guerbois.
Visit the place
The Cafe Guerbois was the principal gathering place of the circle centred on Manet through the 1860s.
Visit the place
Manet moved to an apartment at 39 rue de Saint-Petersbourg in 1878 and remained associated with the address until his death in 1883.
Visit the place
Manet was born at what is now 5 rue Bonaparte on 23 January 1832. The street was then called the rue des Petits-Augustins.
Visit the place
Manet's studio through the 1870s, until July 1878. Its windows overlooked the rue Mosnier, now the rue de Berne, which he painted several times including the flags hung for the national holiday of 30 June 1878.
Visit the place
Manet's studio in the years immediately after he left Thomas Couture's teaching, before the Salon scandals of the 1860s.
Visit the place
Manet's studio through the 1860s, where Emile Zola sat for his portrait in 1868. The street was later renamed rue Mederic and renumbered, so the modern address is a conversion rather than a verified identification.
Visit the place
Manet showed the painting then titled Le Bain, now known as Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, at the Salon des Refuses of 1863, held in the Palais de l'Industrie.
Visit the placeA French painter, born in Paris in 1832 and died there in 1883. His paintings of the 1860s broke the conventions of official French art and opened the way for Impressionism, though he never exhibited with the Impressionists.
Because of who she is and how she looks at you. The pose comes straight from Titian's Venus of Urbino, but Titian's woman is a goddess and Manet's is a Paris prostitute, painted in flat harsh light, unashamed, meeting the viewer's eye as she would a customer. The painting had to be rehung high and guarded after visitors tried to attack it.
Two men in modern dress sit talking on the grass in a wood; beside them a naked woman looks out of the picture at the viewer. The composition is borrowed from a Renaissance engraving. What offended the 1863 public was the modern clothes, the picnic litter and the woman's direct, unembarrassed look.
No, although he is usually shown with them. He was older, he refused every invitation to their independent exhibitions, he kept submitting to the official Salon, and he went on using black, which they had abandoned. They regarded him as the leader of the new painting anyway, and his own work lightened under their influence after 1870.
The reflection does not match the room. The barmaid's reflected back appears far to the right, where it could not be, and a customer faces her in the mirror who is not standing in front of her in the picture. Manet did it deliberately, and the painting has been argued about ever since.
Of complications of untreated syphilis. From about 1879 he suffered pain and difficulty walking from locomotor ataxia, a late effect of the disease. In April 1883 his left foot became gangrenous and the leg was amputated. He died eleven days later, aged fifty-one.
Associated with
As the admired elder who never joined: the Met records that Manet declined invitations to this and all seven subsequent independent exhibitions, while remaining central to the circle that mounted them.
Met
The Met places Manet among the friends who gathered at Monet's homes and gardens and often painted alongside their host.
Buried at · 1883
Manet is buried in the family tomb at Passy Cemetery, which also holds his brother Eugene Manet and Eugene's wife, the painter Berthe Morisot.
Exhibited at · 1863
Manet showed the painting then titled Le Bain, now known as Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, at the Salon des Refuses of 1863, held in the Palais de l'Industrie.
Frequented
By the early 1870s the Nouvelle Athenes on the place Pigalle had become the meeting place for Manet, Degas and their circle, succeeding the Cafe Guerbois.
Frequented
The Cafe Guerbois was the principal gathering place of the circle centred on Manet through the 1860s.
Lived at · 1878–1883
Manet moved to an apartment at 39 rue de Saint-Petersbourg in 1878 and remained associated with the address until his death in 1883.
Lived at · 1832
Manet was born at what is now 5 rue Bonaparte on 23 January 1832. The street was then called the rue des Petits-Augustins.
Studied at
Manet registered as a copyist at the Louvre. He and Degas probably met in the galleries in 1859 while both were copying paintings there.
Worked at
Manet's studio through the 1870s, until July 1878. Its windows overlooked the rue Mosnier, now the rue de Berne, which he painted several times including the flags hung for the national holiday of 30 June 1878.
Worked at · 1856–1859
Manet's studio in the years immediately after he left Thomas Couture's teaching, before the Salon scandals of the 1860s.
Worked at
Manet's studio through the 1860s, where Emile Zola sat for his portrait in 1868. The street was later renamed rue Mederic and renumbered, so the modern address is a conversion rather than a verified identification.
Influenced
Manet's flat handling and contemporary subjects gave the younger painters who became the Impressionists their starting point, and Monet took the modern-life subject and the loose brushwork directly. The two painted alongside each other at Argenteuil in the summer of 1874, after which Manet's own palette lightened. Monet later organised the public subscription that bought Olympia for the French state.
Met
Manet and Degas met in the Louvre in the early 1860s, where Degas was copying, and spent the next twenty years in a friendship that ran through the same cafés, the same Salons and the same arguments about the new painting. Degas painted Manet and his wife; Manet, unhappy with how his wife had been rendered, cut the canvas.
Met
Zola defended Manet in print in 1866, when the Salon jury had rejected him and the press was mocking Olympia. Manet painted Zola's portrait the following year, with one of Zola's own pamphlets on the writer's desk and a print of Olympia pinned to the wall behind him. The portrait was shown at the Salon of 1868 and is now in the Musée d'Orsay.
Associated with · 1863–1883
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was rejected by the Salon jury in 1863 and shown at the Salon des Refusés, where its nude woman beside clothed men drew public laughter. The scandal was less about nudity, familiar in academic painting, than about a scene that refused a reassuring mythological explanation.
Met
The Met records the friendship plainly: Manet befriended Morisot, and she eventually married his younger brother Eugène. The Orsay catalogues her as 'Berthe Morisot (Madame Eugène Manet).'
Met
Manet's commitment to modern life shaped the circle Renoir painted in, and the Orsay names them together among the 'painters of modern life' alongside Degas, Caillebotte, and Monet; the BMJ account of Renoir's established years counts Manet among his friends.
Met · 1858–1867
Close friends through the last decade of the poet's life. Baudelaire, by then the most feared art critic in Paris, defended Manet's paintings while the Salon public was jeering them, and Manet put him in the crowd of La Musique aux Tuileries (1862). The friendship ran until Baudelaire's stroke in 1866 and his death the following year.
Met · 1863–1864
Their pictures were the twin scandals of the 1863 Salon des Refusés — Whistler's White Girl and Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The following year the two posed together, with Charles Baudelaire, for Fantin-Latour's group portrait Hommage à Delacroix; Manet later introduced Whistler to the critic Théodore Duret, who helped sell his mother's portrait to France in 1891.
Influenced by · 1865
Édouard Manet went to the Prado in Madrid on 1 September 1865, saw the Velázquez rooms and called him the painter of painters in a letter to his friend the painter Henri Fantin-Latour. He singled out the full-length portrait of the jester Pablo de Valladolid, writing that the background disappears and air surrounds the man dressed in black. The Prado quoted Manet's words for that picture when it began restoring it in 2026.
Depicted in · 1862
The National Gallery identifies the painter himself at the far left of the canvas, holding a cane, his body cut by the edge of the picture and partly hidden by the animal painter Comte Albert de Balleroy.
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