vol. 2, p. 330).
19. Camille Pissarro, The Marne at Chennevières, about 1864–1865.
Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 145.5 cm.
National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.
Édouard Manet
20. Édouard Manet, Lola de Valence, 1862.
Oil on canvas, 123 × 92 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
21. Édouard Manet, Street Singer, c.1862.
Oil on canvas, 171.1 × 105.8 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The art of Manet was one of the most important aesthetic factors contributing to the emergence of Impressionism. Although he was only twelve years older than Monet, Bazille, Renoir, and Sisely, those painters considered him a master. “Manet was as important to us as Cimabue and Giotto were for the painters of the Italian Renaissance,” Renoir told his son (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 117). The originality of Manet’s painting and his independence from academic canons opened new creative horizons for the Impressionists.
His wealthy family of the Paris bourgeoisie wanted their son to be a lawyer, not an artist-painter. As a compromise, it was decided Manet would become a sailor. After failing the entrance exams for the Naval Academy. In 1850, with his school friend Antonin Proust, Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture.
Manet constantly copied the old masters and demonstrated a wide variety of interests at the same time he was training in Couture’s studio. During trips to European cities he copied paintings in museums, including Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and probably the museums of Kassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Florence, and Rome. He was very interested in the nude, in his own words, “the first and last word in art.” The Louvre was also where Manet often made new acquaintances. It was there that in 1857 he met Henri Fantin-Latour and few years later Degas.
Manet also had a role model among his living contemporaries: Eugène Delacroix. When critics attacked Manet’s painting Music in the Tuileries Gardens, Delacroix said that he regretted “being unable to come to this man’s defence.” (Manet, op. cit., p. 126). The year was 1863, shortly before Delacroix’s death and during Manet’s exhibit at the Martinet gallery. Manet attended Delacroix’s funeral with Charles Baudelaire. The loss of Delacroix coincided with the advent of Manet’s art before the public. Manet had yet to visit Spain; his awareness of Spanish painting was limited to the Louvre’s collection and to reproductions. Nevertheless, the young Parisian painter had discovered in the work of seventeenth-century Spanish masters the colour quality he was seeking in his own painting.
22. Édouard Manet, Portrait of Théodore Duret, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 46.5 × 35.5 cm.
Petit Palais – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
23. Édouard Manet, The Absinthe Drinker, c.1859.
Oil on canvas, 180.5 × 105.6 cm.
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
24. Édouard Manet, Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet, 1860.
Oil on canvas, 110 × 90 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Victorine Louise Meurent, Manet’s favourite model, played a special role in his painting during the 1860s. The painter met the young Russian girl with milky white skin somewhere in a Parisian crowd, perhaps in rue Maître Albert where she lived, not far from Manet’s studio. She posed for Manet on numerous occasions after The Street Singer, including the marvellous painting entitled, Miss Victorine Meurent in the Costume of an Espada (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), which Manet exhibited a little later. Manet actually retained the name of his model in the title of this highly eccentric composition. Although there was absolutely nothing Spanish about the subject, the painting had the atmosphere of Spain, which the painter had never actually seen. Manet was criticised for the clash between the bullfight scene in the background and the figure of Victorine; his inability to establish proportions; and even for his drawing and painting skills.
Among the paintings exhibited at the Martinet gallery, Lola de Valence (Paris, Musée d’Orsay) was unquestionably the most Spanish. On the surface of Lola’s skirt, which he painted in broad black strokes, Manet seemed to have carelessly thrown small bits of red, green, and yellow impasto. It represented an unprecedented freedom, even compared to Courbet’s palette painting. Courbet’s name automatically came to mind at the Martinet exhibition. Manet was definitely walking in Courbet’s footsteps with his composition entitled, Music in the Tuileries Gardens (London, The National Gallery). Nevertheless, Manet had more spontaneity; he did not elaborate the setting, but seemed to capture a slice of life as it unfolded around him.
To the future Impressionists, Manet’s colour and style of painting were a revelation, even if in principle they contrasted with their own investigations. At this stage, Manet was oblivious to plein-air painting and the direct observation of colour in nature held no interest for him. The coloration of Manet’s “Spanish” paintings was acquired from the museums. He had intensified his colour and made his brushwork more expressive than that of the old masters. Moreover, Manet had actually invented the colour that his admirers, the future impressionists, were trying to find in living nature.
Two months after the Martinet gallery show, Paris got a new surprise. On 1 May, 1863, for the first time in the history of French art, two parallel exhibitions opened simultaneously: the traditional Salon and the Salon des Refusés. Napoleon III had come to personally tour the exhibition rooms shortly before their opening. Astonished by the jury’s strictness, he ordered all the rejected paintings be exhibited. Manet, in the most remote room, burned a hole in the wall with his Luncheon on the Grass” (A. Tabarant, Manet. Histoire catalographique, Paris, 1931, p. 95). In his landscape, Manet had broken the tradition of following the classical rules of constructing aerial perspective. Manet’s foreground is bright green, rather than a warm, yellow-brown; and Manet’s background shines with yellow sunlight, rather than fading into blue-green. In the middle ground, a half-dressed woman splashes around in pure blue water. In the foreground, the artist paints a still life, whose bright blue shadows and yellow and cherry-red colours compete with the tonalities of the figures. Broad strokes of colour applied with apparent carelessness give the impression of a sketch made a la prima. In fact, Manet was still using a multi-layered pictorial technique, as he was taught by Couture, a top painting instructor. X-ray photographs of Manet’s paintings show a classic under layer of lead white, upon which (once it had dried) layers of colour were superimposed. The end result was nevertheless inconsistent with traditional values; it moreover seemed impossible for such a painting to have been executed out of doors.
25. Édouard Manet, Portrait of Victorine Meurent, c.1862.
Oil on canvas, 42.9 × 43.8 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
