Manet’s picnic nude crashed the Salon and opened modern art
Édouard Manet (1832–1883) painted contemporary Paris when academies still wanted gods and history. Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1865) scandalized critics yet marked, for later painters, the hinge from Realism into Impressionism and modern art.
Born 23 January 1832 in a Rue des Petits Augustins mansion to judge Auguste Manet and diplomat’s daughter Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, he had brothers Eugène and Gustave. Uncle Edmond Fournier steered him to the Louvre and drawing classes where he met Antonin Proust. A Rio training voyage in 1848 and two failed navy exams finally freed him for Thomas Couture’s studio (1850–1856), plus study trips absorbing Hals, Velázquez, and Goya.
By 1856 his studio favored loose strokes and suppressed transitions. The Absinthe Drinker and Music in the Tuileries (shown 1862) put friends and outdoor leisure where heroes belonged; fury followed. The Salon rejected Déjeuner in 1863; Napoleon III’s Salon des Refusés made it notorious beside Whistler’s White Girl. Clothed men, a nude woman, and “floor mop” brushwork paraphrased Raphael via Raimondi while looking shockingly present-tense.
Olympia, accepted in 1865, restaged Titian’s Venus of Urbino as a confrontational courtesan; officials reportedly guarded it from puncture. Courbet, Cézanne, Monet, and later Gauguin saw the breakthrough. After Auguste’s 1862 death Manet married Dutch pianist Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863; her son Léon modeled repeatedly. Through Berthe Morisot he joined the Batignolles circle around Degas, Monet, and Renoir.
Upper-class birth, refused navy destiny, and Salon warfare made Manet the reluctant prophet of painting modern life. He died 30 April 1883, still arguing that contemporary subjects deserved Old Master seriousness.
Source: Édouard Manet
