Édouard Manet was born on 23 January 1832 in Paris and died on 30 April 1883. He is the artist that no one, during his lifetime, was able to place in a single category, and that is precisely why he changed everything. A painter of modern life, a devoted admirer of the Spanish and Venetian old masters, a provocateur despite himself, he imposed with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863) a pictorial frankness that his contemporaries never forgave. A fellow traveller of the Impressionists without ever joining their ranks, a tutelary figure for a generation he never sought to lead, he left more than 430 catalogued works, held in the world’s greatest museums, and an open question that art history has never quite resolved: was he the last of the classicists, or the first of the moderns?
What strikes me most about Manet’s work is precisely the paradox that his contemporaries never forgave him: he painted with one eye on Velázquez, Titian, and Goya, and yet he never ceased to be of his time, as he himself liked to put it. His most scandalous works are also his most learned. Olympia without Titian makes no sense; yet Olympia is not Titian. It is this in-between, this permanent tension between an avowed tradition and an assumed modernity, that makes Manet a figure impossible to categorise, and impossible to ignore.
Vianney and the VMuseum Editorial Team
Biography of Édouard Manet
Origins and Training (1832-1856)
Born on 23 January 1832 in Paris into an upper-bourgeois family, Édouard Manet was the son of Auguste Manet, a senior magistrate at the Ministry of Justice, and Eugénie Désirée Fournier, daughter of a diplomat. His maternal uncle, Captain Édouard Fournier, introduced him to painting from childhood through regular visits to the Louvre, particularly the Spanish Gallery, a formative experience that would shape his tastes for the rest of his life.
After an undistinguished education at the Collège Rollin and two successive failures at the Naval Academy entrance examination, Manet embarked in 1848 as a pilot’s apprentice aboard a training ship bound for Rio de Janeiro. This six-month voyage gave him the opportunity to multiply sketches and observations, but he also contracted a venereal disease whose neurological complications, a locomotor ataxia, would progressively weaken him from 1876 onward and ultimately cause his premature death.
Back in France, Manet entered the studio of academic painter Thomas Couture in 1850, where he remained for six years. The relationship was fractious from the start: as his friend Antonin Proust recalls in his Souvenirs, Manet could not bear the models who “struck exaggerated poses” and constantly demanded more naturalness. He consistently did the opposite of what Couture taught, while acknowledging his master’s genuine technical command. He completed his training through journeys to the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, and by copying at the Louvre the old masters who would become his permanent interlocutors: Tintoretto, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Delacroix, whose Barque of Dante struck him with particular force.
Spanish Influence and Early Works (1856-1863)
Hispanism is the first great hallmark of Manet’s painting. Long before his first journey to Spain in 1865, he devoted several canvases to Iberian subjects, captivated by Velázquez, whom he publicly called “the painter of painters”: The Absinthe Drinker (1858–59), The Spanish Singer (1860), his first real success at the official Salon, Lola de Valence (1862). The influence of Goya runs through his bullfighting scenes and, later, the frontal, unsparing composition of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867).
At the same time, Manet established himself as a figure in Parisian social life. Immaculately dressed, he frequented the Café Tortoni, the Tuileries Gardens, and gathered around him a “small court” of artists and writers. Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is the painting of that world: one recognises in it Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Fantin-Latour, and his brother Eugène. It is already modern life painted without distance or condescension, the bourgeoisie are there, with their hats and their conversations, as worthy of a painting as any Olympian god.
The Founding Scandals (1863-1870)
The decisive turning point came in 1863. At the Salon des Refusés, established that year by imperial decree to accommodate works rejected by the official Salon, Manet exhibited Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, initially titled The Bath. The canvas shows a nude woman seated in a woodland glade alongside two men in contemporary dress: the complete absence of any mythological or allegorical framing made the scene intolerable to audiences accustomed to seeing female nudity justified only by Antiquity or Scripture. The direct reference to Titian’s Concert champêtre did not soften the shock, it compounded it, by making the provocation perfectly legible.
Two years later, Olympia (painted 1863, exhibited at the Salon of 1865) unleashed an even more violent storm. The reclining nude is manifestly inspired by Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but Manet’s courtesan, whose model, Victorine Meurent, returns the viewer’s gaze with a studied indifference, refuses every idealising artifice. Zola publicly came to the painter’s defence in L’Événement (1866), inaugurating a lasting intellectual friendship. Manet paid tribute to him in the Portrait of Émile Zola (1868), now in the Musée d’Orsay.
These two scandals made Manet, despite himself, the figurehead of a generation of painters eager to break with academicism, even as he never sought to found a movement and continued to submit his works to the official Salon.
The Many Facets of Manet’s Work
Portraits
Portraits, above all of women, constitute one of the defining threads of Manet’s output. Victorine Meurent, his principal model for some twelve years, traverses several major canvases: The Street Singer (1862), Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada (1862), Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), Olympia (1863), The Railway (1872–73). Their collaboration is among the most singular of the nineteenth century: Victorine is never a mere model in Manet’s work, she is a presence, a gaze, a decision about what to paint.
Manet’s relationship with Berthe Morisot is best understood through the paintings themselves, for it is there that it takes on its full meaning. When Manet painted The Balcony (1868–69), Berthe Morisot was still a young painter whom the Salon was only beginning to notice. By the time he created Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), a portrait of rare intensity in which the black of her dress absorbs all the light and leaves the face seemingly suspended, she had become one of the most assured figures of what would become Impressionism. In 1874, she married Eugène Manet, Édouard’s brother. Berthe Morisot with a Fan (1874) brings this series of portraits to a close like a carefully placed full stop. Few artistic friendships of the nineteenth century can be read so clearly in the paintings themselves.
His literary friendships take material form in portraits of Baudelaire, Zola (Portrait of Émile Zola, 1868) and Mallarmé (Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876), with whom he collaborated directly on illustrated publications. Suzanne Leenhoff, the piano teacher he married in 1863, and their son Léon appear in numerous canvases, including Reading (c. 1865).
Historical Paintings
A committed republican, Manet served in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. His political sensibility surfaces in The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867–68), a composition openly modelled on Goya’s Third of May, which evokes the abandonment of Mexico’s emperor by Napoleon III. The canvas was seized by the imperial censors and not shown publicly in France until after the fall of the Empire. Following the Commune, Manet expressed his horror at the repression in two celebrated lithographs: The Barricade and Civil War (1871–73).
Seascapes and Open-Air Painting
From 1868, summer stays at Boulogne-sur-Mer fed a series of marine paintings. Boats at Berck-sur-Mer bears witness to this sustained coastal practice. Moonlight over the Port of Boulogne (1869) captures with delicacy the nocturnal return of a fishing boat, one of the rare canvases in which Manet surrenders to something close to silence.
In the summer of 1874, Manet spent time at Argenteuil and Gennevilliers alongside the Impressionists. What this period reveals is less a conversion to their aesthetic than a dialogue: look at Boating, painted that same year, and compare it mentally to a Monet from the same stretch of the Seine. In Monet, the water trembles, reflections absorb everything, the edges of things dissolve in light; in Manet, the boatman holds firm, his silhouette reads cleanly, the composition is built. His palette lightens, his touch loosens, but his way of looking at the world remains that of a painter who wants to see things, not dissolve them.
In the Conservatory (1878–79), held at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, illustrates his ability to capture bourgeois intimacy with a remarkable economy of means: two figures, filtered light, and the immediate sensation of a suspended afternoon.
Cafés and Modern Life
Cafés, brasseries, and café-concerts became a recurring theme after 1878. At the Café (1878), The Plum (1878), The Waitress (1878–79), At Père Lathuille’s (1879): Manet documents Parisian life with a journalist’s precision and a painter’s sensitivity.
Woman Reading (1880–82, Art Institute of Chicago), most likely painted in a café, is a perfect embodiment of this way of seizing the modern instant: a figure absorbed in her book, the diffuse light of an interior room, a seemingly simple composition that reveals, on closer examination, a rigorously considered structure.
His final major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–82, Courtauld Gallery, London), shows the barmaid Suzon before a mirror whose reflection is geometrically impossible: the customer glimpsed to the right in the glass cannot be standing where the perspective implies he is. This deliberate disorientation, Manet knew exactly what he was doing, the preparatory studies confirm it, may be the single most radically modern intuition of his entire career. He is painting not what one sees, but what one feels in a place where the gaze no longer knows where to settle.
Still Lifes
Manet once said: “A painter can say everything he wants with fruits or flowers, or clouds alone.” This was not modesty, it was a programme. His still lifes form one of the most undervalued sections of his output: White Peonies (1864), Bouquet of Lilac (1883), Salmon and Shrimp (1864), Melon and Peaches (1866), A Bundle of Asparagus (1880).
Moss Roses in a Vase and Flowers in a Crystal Vase belong to his final years, when illness compelled him to work seated and to reduce his formats. These small floral canvases, rapid in appearance, precise in execution, reveal an undiminished mastery of the brush. André Malraux was among the first to note, in The Voices of Silence, that these late works carry something irreducible: pure colour in its raw state, with no subject left to justify it.
Prints and Illustrations
Between 1860 and 1882, Manet produced close to a hundred prints (etchings, lithographs, woodcuts). He collaborated with Mallarmé to illustrate Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1875) in the French translation, and then The Afternoon of a Faun (1876), two projects that testify to an intellectual curiosity reaching well beyond the confines of painting.
Manet and Impressionism: A Misleading Proximity
The confusion is so widespread that it deserves revisiting through a concrete image. Picture Boating (1874) placed beside a Monet painted the same year on the same stretch of the Seine. In Monet, the water shimmers, reflections invade the canvas, the outlines of things dissolve in the light. In Manet, the boatman is simply there, his shape holds, his gaze is clear, the composition is firmly built. Both painters are looking at the same river and seeing two different things: Monet seeks the fleeting sensation, Manet seeks a lasting presence.
This is not a question of hesitation or lag on Manet’s part, it is a fundamental choice. He shares with the Impressionists their subject matter (modern life, open-air settings, Parisian leisure), their social circle (he is the respected elder of Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Berthe Morisot), and certain shifts in his palette. Yet he refused to participate in their collective exhibitions from 1874 to 1886, and continued to submit his work to the official Salon, not from conservatism, but because he was seeking recognition from the very institution he was challenging. That is the whole complexity of the man: the rebel who still wanted the jury’s prize.
His position in the history of nineteenth-century French painting is unique: he belonged to no constituted movement, and inspired several.
Final Years and Death (1876-1883)
From 1876, locomotor ataxia became increasingly apparent. Manet spent his summers undergoing treatments at Bellevue and Meudon. He worked more and more seated, favoured smaller formats and pastel, a less physically demanding medium that he came to handle with growing sureness. These years of forced constraint paradoxically yielded some of his most liberated works.
In 1881, he received a medal at the Salon and was awarded the Légion d’honneur by his childhood friend Antonin Proust, appointed Minister of Fine Arts by Gambetta. The ceremony took place on 1 January 1882. It was the official recognition he had waited for his entire life, and it came too late for him to truly enjoy it.
In the spring of 1883, gangrene required the amputation of his left foot. Manet died ten days after the operation, on 30 April 1883, in Paris, aged 51. He is buried at the Passy Cemetery, where an epitaph engraved by Félix Bracquemond in 1890, Manet et manebit (“He remains and shall remain”), captured the sentiment of the art world at his passing.
Legacy and Posterity
Manet’s posthumous recognition took a particularly moving form. In 1890, seven years after his death, Claude Monet organised a public subscription to purchase Olympia from the painter’s widow and present it to the French State. He raised more than twenty thousand francs from around a hundred subscribers, including Zola and Mallarmé and many fellow artists. The canvas entered the Musée du Luxembourg in 1890, then the Louvre in 1907, forty-four years after its creation, officially enshrining an artist whom Degas, shortly after his death, had called “greater than we thought.” It is today held at the Musée d’Orsay.
Monet’s gesture says something essential: the generation that Manet had accompanied without ever formally joining paid him, after his death, the tribute that institutions had withheld during his lifetime.
Manet’s formal legacy is considerable: by refusing to justify nudity through mythology, by painting the Paris of his time with the same exacting attention that the old masters devoted to their grandest historical compositions, by handling pictorial matter with a freedom of touch unprecedented in French painting, he opened the door to all the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. His maxim, “One must be of one’s time,” remains one of the most charged phrases in the entire history of Western art. It explains at once his scandals and his posterity.
Manet’s Works Analysed on VMuseum
Explore the works of Édouard Manet with commentary from the VMuseum editorial team:
- Édouard Manet: The Spanish Singer (1860) — His first Salon success, and the clearest expression of his early Hispanism
- Édouard Manet: La Brioche (1870) — A still life of surprising intimacy
- Édouard Manet: Jeanne (Spring) (1881) — One of his last ambitious portraits
- Édouard Manet: The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874) — Manet at Monet’s: two visions of open-air painting
- Édouard Manet: In the Conservatory (1878–79) — Bourgeois intimacy captured with economy
- Édouard Manet: Woman Reading (1880–82) — The Parisian café as private space
- Édouard Manet: A Game of Croquet (1873) — Manet outdoors: bourgeois sociability staged with precision
- Édouard Manet: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–82) — The final masterwork: a pictorial enigma still open today
See all of Manet’s works on VMuseum
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions about Édouard Manet
Was Manet an Impressionist?
No, and the answer deserves a little explanation, since the confusion is extremely common. Manet participated in none of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886, and consistently submitted his work to the official Salon. He was the respected elder of the group, Monet, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot looked to him as a guiding figure, but his painting operates differently: where the Impressionists sought to dissolve form in light and atmosphere, Manet maintained the presence of things, the legibility of the subject, the construction of the composition. He is more accurately described as a pioneer of pictorial modernity, unclassifiable between Realism and Impressionism.
What is the difference between Manet and Monet?
Confusing the two names is one of art history’s most persistent mix-ups. Édouard Manet (1832–1883) is the elder; Claude Monet (1840–1926) is one of the founders of Impressionism. Manet was Parisian by birth and by sensibility, a painter of social life, interiors, bodies, and faces; Monet was the painter of landscape, natural light, and its infinite variations. The two men knew and respected each other deeply, Manet painted The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874), and it was Monet who organised the subscription to offer Olympia to the French State after Manet’s death.
Why did Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe cause such a scandal?
It was not nudity itself that caused the shock, the Salon exhibited nudes regularly. What was unacceptable was the complete absence of symbolic or mythological justification. The scene is resolutely contemporary: a nude woman, two men in period dress, a picnic. No goddesses, no allegory, no Antiquity to lend the scene legitimacy. Added to this was the woman’s direct gaze at the viewer, delivered without modesty or invitation, with a composed indifference that read as insolence. For an audience of the Second Empire accustomed to idealised, allegorically distanced nudity, this was simply unbearable.
Where can Manet’s works be seen today?
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris holds the most important collection, including Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Balcony, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, and the Portrait of Émile Zola. The Courtauld Gallery in London holds A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Art Institute of Chicago also hold major works. On VMuseum, our curated selection of Manet’s paintings offers detailed analysis of works held across these institutions.
How many paintings did Manet produce?
The catalogue raisonné compiled by Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein (Édouard Manet: Catalogue raisonné, Lausanne–Paris, 1975) records 430 oil paintings, to which must be added numerous pastels, watercolours, drawings, and close to a hundred prints. This relatively contained body of work, for a career spanning thirty years, stands in striking contrast to the enormous impact of the output: every canvas counts, none was produced simply to fill a quota.
What was the relationship between Manet and Berthe Morisot?
It is best read through the paintings. When Manet painted The Balcony (1868–69), Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) was an artist whom the Salon was just beginning to take notice of. By the time he produced Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), she had become one of the most assured figures of what would become Impressionism. In 1874, she married Eugène Manet, Édouard’s brother, becoming his sister-in-law. Berthe Morisot with a Fan (1874) closes this sequence of portraits as a final, considered salute. Their artistic friendship was one of the most productive of the nineteenth century: Morisot influenced Manet’s move towards a freer touch; Manet gave Morisot a visibility that the art world would have taken far longer to grant her on its own.
Did Manet achieve success during his lifetime?
His success was belated and ambiguous. The 1860s were marked by scandal and repeated rejections from the Salon. Reception improved gradually from the 1870s onward. In 1881, he received a medal at the Salon and the Légion d’honneur from his childhood friend Antonin Proust, newly appointed Minister of Fine Arts, a recognition that arrived with a bitter irony, since by then illness had already significantly curtailed his practice. Full institutional consecration came posthumously: Olympia entered the national collections in 1890 through the subscription organised by Monet, and the Louvre in 1907.
What was the locomotor ataxia that Manet suffered from?
Locomotor ataxia is a progressive degeneration of the nervous system affecting the coordination of movement and gait. The form Manet suffered from is described in biographical sources as generally associated with the late complications of a syphilis contracted during his voyage to Rio de Janeiro in 1848, a retrospective diagnosis that art historians accept cautiously, given the absence of absolute medical certainty. Symptoms became markedly worse from 1876. By 1880, Manet was working increasingly seated and reducing his formats. In the spring of 1883, gangrene led to the amputation of his left foot; he died ten days after the operation.
Bibliography
- Courthion, Pierre – Manet Told by Himself and His Contemporaries, P. Cailler, Geneva, 1953; Édouard Manet, Cercle d’art, Paris, 1978, repr. 1991
- Darragon, Éric – Manet, Fayard, 1989, repr. Hachette-Pluriel, 1989; Manet, Citadelles, Paris, 1991
- Duret, Théodore – Histoire d’Édouard Manet et de son œuvre, H. Floury, Paris, 1902
- Lacambre, Geneviève – Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, exh. cat., Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2002
- Moreau-Nélaton, Étienne – Manet raconté par lui-même, H. Laurens, Paris, 1926
- Proust, Antonin – Édouard Manet: Souvenirs, H. Laurens, Paris, 1913, repr. L’Échoppe, Paris, 1988
- Rouart, Denis & Wildenstein, Daniel – Édouard Manet: Catalogue raisonné, Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne-Paris, 1975
- Tabarant, Adolphe – Manet et ses œuvres, Gallimard, Paris, 1947
- Reff, Theodore – Manet: Olympia, The Penguin Press, New York and London, 1976
