Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet stood at the head of the circle that became Impressionism and never once exhibited with it. His Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863) drew the loudest scandals in the Paris art world of their decade, and the younger painters who mounted the first independent exhibition in 1874 had spent years arguing at his café table. He declined that exhibition and the seven that followed, and submitted his work to the official Salon until the end of his life.

A judge's son

Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832, into a haut-bourgeois family. His father, Auguste Manet, was a judge; his mother, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat. The family had the law in mind for him, and painting was not part of the plan. He tried for the navy instead, failed the entrance examination twice, and in 1848–49 sailed on a training vessel to Rio de Janeiro.

In 1850 the family gave way, and he entered the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture, where he trained until 1856.

Two Salon scandals

The Salon jury rejected Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1863, and Manet showed it instead at the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition of that year's refused paintings. The picture placed a nude woman at a picnic beside two fully dressed men, and the juxtaposition caused an uproar. The same year he married the piano teacher Suzanne Leenhoff and painted Olympia.

Olympia reworks Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534) as a contemporary Parisian scene, posed by the nineteen-year-old model Victorine Meurent, who had also posed for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Shown at the Salon of 1865, it was condemned by conservative critics as immoral and vulgar, and the administration took precautions to keep the canvas from being destroyed.

The table at the Café Guerbois

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:

• The painters Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille.
• The writers Émile Zola and Louis Edmond Duranty, and the painter Henri Fantin-Latour.
• Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, who attended occasionally.

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.

Berthe Morisot

Manet met Berthe Morisot in 1868, and the friendship reshaped both careers. She posed for The Balcony (1868–69), seated at the left of the composition he showed at the Salon of 1869, and he painted her fourteen times in all. The portrait with a bouquet of violets, from 1872, hangs at the Musée d'Orsay. She was never his student, and the influence between the two painters ran in both directions.

Morisot showed in the first Impressionist exhibition and drew Manet into the group's orbit, though never onto its walls. In December 1874, the year of that first exhibition, she married his younger brother, Eugène Manet.

The last years

Official recognition arrived late. The French government awarded Manet the Légion d'honneur in 1881. By then he was ill with locomotor ataxia, a loss of muscular control that accounts of his life attribute to syphilis.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), completed the year before his death and hung at that year's Salon, was his last major painting. In April 1883 gangrene forced the amputation of his left foot, and he died in Paris eleven days after the operation, on 30 April 1883, at fifty-one. He is buried in Passy Cemetery; Berthe Morisot, who died in 1895, was buried beside him and Eugène.

Olympia entered the national collections in 1890, when Claude Monet organized a public subscription to buy the painting from Manet's widow and present it to the French state. It hangs today in the Musée d'Orsay.