Paul Gauguin said that “…painting begins with Manet.”  While artists seldom have good relations with other artists, and Paul Cezanne didn’t really like Manet, even he stated that Manet brought “…a new state to painting.”

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Born in Paris on January 23, 1832 Edouard was born into a family of lawyers, civil servants, and judges.  His young life marked both by his fathers strict puritanism as well as the socialite life that comes with a family that held civil receptions every week.  It was not due to any form of sociability on his father’s part, it was simply expected of a high earning civil servant.  One had to keep up appearances.

Edouard went off to school at the age of 12, to the College Rollin.  Yet had his father not been a highly placed public official, Edouard would have flunked out.  It was when the College added a course in drawing that it all started.  His uncle suggested he sign up for it, but his father would not hear of it.  His uncle instead had Edouard sign up for the class and paid for himself.  This ultimately led to an estrangement between Edouard’s father and his mother’s brother.

But Edouard Manet was not to become an artist yet.  Since he did not want to pursue a career in law or civil service his father had enlist in the Navy.  At the age of 16 he took the entrance exam and failed.  However, enlistees could spend a half a year on a training voyage and retake the test.  After spending what he described as a boring life at sea for six months, he returned home and failed the entrance test once more.

This was when he decided that he would pursue a life of an artist.  In the same year 1848, was the revolution and King Louis-Philippe was overthrown.

Art would, ironically, lead Edouard back to school.  His father wanted him to attend the fashionable Ecole de Beaux Arts, where the artist Claude Monet attended the studio of Charles Gleyre.  But Edouard would have none of it and instead chose the studio Thomas Couture, which he entered at the age of eighteen.

While the revolution raged around Manet, he was on the verge of his own revolution.  For the day, art was about style, not reality.  And everything was old school.  That was it, old school or no school.

He would paint and study under Couture for six years before deciding the dogma under which he would paint “There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see.  When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.  When you haven’t, you begin again.  All the rest is humbug.”  Even though he would again, not truly paint for himself, but make copies of other masters work, as all fledgling artists were doing.  It brought in income.

AT the age of twenty-nine he produced his first original work “The Absinthe Drinker”.

But it was not received well at all, and was refused acceptance by the Salon.  It was too original, too individual.  But this failure would not deter him as just four years later he would produce his most controversial, and most renowned work, “The Lunch on the Grass”.

The shadow of the scandal this piece produced would haunt Edouard’s work for the rest of his life.

But the revolution in painting had begun for him.  He produced a work called “Music in the Tuileries” which is noted as being the first time someone had simply captured a moment in time without making a statement or commentary to go with it.  Modern art was born.  Art that spoke for itself.

At this point in 1866 a revolution is art is taking place.  Edouard and his fellow artists, Gustave Courbet, Camille Corot, Honore Daumier, and Jean-Francois Millet, were inventing the techniques for art to record contemporary life.

Scandal continued to follow Edouard’s career, he submitted more works for consideration to the Salon.  His work called “Olympia” was not well received at all, although it went on display.  A critic of the time, Paul de Saint-Victor said “The crowd gathers before Olympia as at the morgue.” while another remarked “Women on the point of giving birth, and proper young girls would be well advised to flee this spectacle.”

Now accepted as a painter, Edouard kept pushing the limits of acceptability.  Archduke Maximilian was urged by Napoleon III to become emperor of Mexico by force of arms.  Unfortunately pressure from the United States made Napoleon III to stop military support to the quest.  Abandoned, Maximilian was captured by the Mexicans, tried, and shot to death.  France was shocked, and story has it that Maximilian’s wife went mad from it.

Edouard wanted to capture this event which had deeply moved the French people, and he created the piece known as “The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian.”  He captured the moment, no commentary needed.

Edouard’s method of painting was…an abandonment of method.  Models who sat for him would comment that he used no technique and sometimes worked as if in a trance.  Stephane Mallarme, a poet, would record “…the frenzy with which he hurled himself at the empty canvas, blindly, as if he had never painted before.”

When the insults became too much for him he fled to Spain, then England, then Holland.  His friends were surprised that he returned from Holland with a wife.  It wasn’t until his father died that he would marry Suzanne Leenhoff.  However there is a riddle, that of Leon-Edouard Koella, Suzanne’s son, supposedly by a man named Koella.  But there is no record of such a man, and scholars believe Manet to be the father, though he never legally became the boys father.  Apparently this was one scandal Manet was not willing to bear.

There are few paintings of his wife, perhaps to avoid bringing criticism of his work onto her, “Reading” being one of them.

As much criticism as Edouard endured, he did have his friends and fans.  The common meeting place for them was at the Cafe Guerbois.  He also became a kind of coach for upcoming artists, when they would feel the pressures of the world, or the pressures of the critics, they would rally around Manet and he would cheer them up and renew their sense of self and artistic vision.  Among those numbered Pissaro, Renoir, Zola, Astruc, Duranty, Duret, Degas, Whistler, Stevens, Guys, Latour, Nadar, and Monet.  A ragtag bunch of artists, painters, poets, and sculptors.

War came again to France, some fled, some enlisted, but most returned after the war and tried to pick up where they left off.  A whole new world was opening up, the world of photography.  Degas himself, later, owning one of the first Kodak’s.  But now, it was the birth of impressionism.

Manet was a great friend to the impressionists, although for himself, the countryside was merely where one went on vacation, not to paint.

In 1878 Manet developed a limp and was quickly forced to take up a cane to get around.  His diagnosed rheumatism, but Manet visited quacks without his doctor knowing, hoping for some relief to the pain.

By 1880 Manet spent most of his time in his studio rather than go about, and suffered from horrible bouts of depression.  It was then that his doctors disclosed to him that he was not suffering from rheumatism but syphilis.  There was nothing they could do.

By 1881, he was working on “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere”, that at times left him so exhausted he would collapse near the painting to recover, and then proceed with more work on it.

He finished it in time to submit it to the Salon and the painting becomes the summit of his lifelong work.

What is unusual about the painting is the mirror.  Do you see the mirror?  It is the entire background of the painting.  What you are seeing is actually only the barmaid looking out at the guests, and the mirror which is reflecting everything else.

For Edouard though things were worse, gangrene had set in, in his foot, and on the advice of physicians had his leg amputated on April 19th.  On April 30, 1883 at the age of 52 Edouard Manet died. 

One day before the opening of the Salon where Folies was to exhibit.

After the death of his friend, Edward Degas said “We did not know he was this great.”