Édouard Manet

“ MANET, ÉDOUARD (1832–1883) , French painter, regarded as the most important master of Impressionism (q.v.) , was born in Paris on the 23rd of January 1832. After spending some time under the tuition of the Abbé Poiloup, he entered the Collège Rollin, where his passion for drawing led him to neglect all his other lessons. His studies finished in 1848, he was placed on board the ship Guadeloupe, voyaging to Rio de Janeiro. On his return he first studied in Couture’s studio (1851) , where his independence often infuriated his master. ”

“ Whatever the fluctuations of the chameleon of the Seven Arts, the best music will be always beautiful; beautiful with the old or the new beauty. Ugliness for the sheer sake of ugliness never endures; but one must be able to define modern beauty, else find oneself in the predicament of those deaf ones who could not or would not hear the beauty of Wagner; or those blind ones who would not or could not see the characteristic truth and beauty in the pictures of Edouard Manet. The sting and glamour of the Liszt orchestral music has compelling quality. ”

“ It is unfortunate that it is only connoisseurs, like ourselves, who can at the same time—in spite of all the repugnance we may feel over it—make an excellent bargain and help a man of such talent. Answer as quickly as possible or make an appointment with me. Amitiés, Edouard Manet.”
This is good proof, if proof were needed, of the straits to which one of the leaders of the group was reduced. It is also odd 34to note that Manet was afraid of a refusal, from both dealers and collectors, to the offer of such a bargain as a score of works by Claude Monet at £4 apiece. ”

“ PORTRAIT OF MADAME M.L.
To-day Manet is considered almost as a classic glory; and the progress for which he had given the impulse, has been so rapid, that many are astonished that he should ever have been considered audacious. Sight is transformed, strife is extinguished, and a large, select public, familiar with Monet and Renoir, judge Manet almost as a long defunct initiator. One has to know his admirable life, one has to know well the incredible inertia of the Salons where he appeared, to give him his full due. ”

“ Manet’s chief merit lies in the fact that all his life long he tried to paint pictures, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully; never with any profound insight into human nature or life, but always straightforwardly and sincerely, and with a strong, firm hand. He painted many portraits of his sister and his friends, but invariably with the intention to do something of more universal validity than a likeness. ”

“ Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of. This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From that time the artist became a chief. ”

“ The drama of life never engrossed him. His world is passionless and almost motionless, coldly impressive. Although he practiced all refinements of modelling, he never made those relaxations of contour which suggest movement. His figures are finely constructed and beautifully placed but emotionally unrelated. They merely exist rather splendidly, as do some of Manet’s figures. Indeed the warning of George Moore as regards Manet applies equally to Piero. It is futile to seek from him anything but fine painting. ”

“ But sufficient stress is not always laid upon the influences at work around Manet in Paris, namely, the influences of Delacroix, Corot, and the men of 1830, who carried but one stage farther the methods and tradition of the English masters, Constable, Bonington, Girtin and Turner.
Apart from sources of inspiration Manet was personally gifted. He possessed (as M. Duret so well points out) the faculty of sight, a gift from Nature which cannot be acquired by will or work. Technique he had obtained after six years’ hard study in the most severe atelier in Paris. ”

“ Les modèles connus qui avaient vu les morceaux faits d'après leurs torses conduire certains élèves à l'école de Rome, alors la suprême récompense, et qui dans leur orgueil s'attribuaient presqu'une part du succès, se revoltaient de voir un tout jeune homme ne leur témoigner aucun respect. Il paraît que fatigué de l'eternelle étude du nu, Manet aurait essayé de draper et même d'habiller les modèles, ce qui aurait causé parmi eux une véritable indignation. ”

“ We look at the picture, and the man and his environment become part of our perception of life. That stout, middle-aged man of fifty, who works all day in some small business, and goes every evening to his café to drink beer, will abide with us for ever. His appearance, and his mode of life, which his appearance so admirably expresses, can never become completely dissociated from our understanding of life. For Manet's "Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot, Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. ”

“ He was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Caillebotte, Berthe Morisot, the young painter Bazille, who met his premature death in 1870, and by the writers Gautier, Banville, Baudelaire (who was a passionate admirer of Manet's) ; then later by Zola, the Goncourts, and Stéphane Mallarmé. This was the first nucleus of a public which was to increase year by year. Manet had the personal qualities of a chief ”

“ He joined one movement, then freed himself of it, then invented another and recommenced to learn painting at a point where anybody else would have continued in his previous manner. "Each time I paint," he said to Mallarmé, "I throw myself into the water to learn swimming." It is not surprising that such a man should have been unequal, and that one can distinguish in his work between experiments, exaggerations due to research, and efforts made to reject the prejudices of which we feel the weight no longer. But it would be unjust to say that Manet has only had the merit of opening up new roads ”

“ A small group watches an old man about to play his fiddle. Some boys, a little girl with a doll (a figure very dear to Manet) , a man drinking, a native of the Orient in a turban and a long robe, these form a straggling composition. The picture is a fantasy of a nation the painter loved but had never yet seen.
Two personal matters affected the life of Manet about this time. His father died, leaving him a considerable private fortune, thus making the artist financially independent of dealers and the ups and downs of public exhibition. ”

“ If by this is implied a keener sensitiveness to certain feelings pulsating in the art of this movement, one will not have very far to go to find its cause in the French impressionistic school of Manet, which, after saturating all types of French artists, undoubtedly invaded writers over here even before the movement of the nineties began. On the age without a doubt it had a lasting influence, so that to a certain degree, without being over-busy with what went before, we may say its writers brought it to no small degree into common use in our literature. ”

“ What Manet’s enduring contributions to painting were have never been surmised by the public. His recognition, coming as it did years after his most significant works had been accomplished and set aside, was due to a reversion of the public’s mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet is popular today for the same reason that the lesser works of Hokusai and Hiroshige are popular, namely: they present an instantaneous image which is at once flat and motionless. As in the days of the mosaicists and early primitives, the74 appreciation of such works demands no intellectual operation. ”

“ The reaction began with Courbet and was given a powerful impetus by Manet who painted things not as he imagined them but as he saw them, and he did not try to see interesting people and things, he did not look for the picturesque but he painted anything he happened to see upon the theory that the value of a work of art depends not upon its subject but upon its technic; that the worth of a painting is to be found in the painting and not in the object that happens to be painted.
Manet painted very few pictures outdoors. ”

“ On the other hand, Manet realised that nature’s forces become objective only through an intellectual process. This attitude marked a decided step in advance of Courbet. Manet painted single figures and simple images devoid of all anecdotal significance, out of his pure love of his medium and his sheer delight in tone and contour. In other words, he represented the modern spirit which repudiates objects conducive to reminiscence, and cares only for “qualities” in art. His intentions were those of Courbet pushed to greater freedom. ”

“ Manet, the Déjeuner, the Musique aux Tuileries, the Bon Bock, Argenteuil, Le Linge, En Bateau and the Bar, will always remain admirable masterpieces which will do credit to French painting, of which the spontaneous, living, clear and bold art of Manet is a direct and very representative product. ”

“ Yes, Hals would have stated them well, but only Manet could have stated the slope of the thighs of the girl—how does she call herself?—Arabella—it is a so hard name to remember—as she steps across the stile. Manet would have found pleasure in her cheeks also. They are a little chapped with the north-west wind that makes the pollard aspens to quiver. How adorable a thing it is, a girl's nose that the north-west wind renders red! ”

“ Their friendship has been jarred by inevitable rivalry. "Degas was painting 'Semiramis' when I was painting 'Modern Paris,'" says Manet. "Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious pictures like Durant, and be fêted and decorated; he is an artist, not by inclination, but by force. ”

“ A group of people at a picnic, several nudes among them. In vain it was pointed out to the modest Parisians (who at the time revelled in the Odalisque of Ingres, in Cabanel, Gérôme, Bouguereau, and other delineators of the chaste) that in the Louvre the Concert of Giorgione depicted just such a scene; but the mixture of dressed and undressed was appalling, and Manet became a man marked for vengeance. Perhaps the exceeding brilliancy of his paint and his unconventional manner of putting it on his canvas had as much to do with the obloquy as his theme. ”

“ Undoubtedly, what is most obviously striking in the history of Manning's career is the persistent strength of his innate characteristics. Through all the changes of his fortunes the powerful spirit of the man worked on undismayed. It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.
His father was a rich West India merchant, a governor of the Bank of England, a Member of Parliament, who drove into town every day from his country seat in a coach and four, and was content with nothing short of a bishop for the christening of his children. ”

“ Never before was a great man's mind so strictly limited to the range of what his eyes saw. Nature wished it so, and, having discovered nature's wish, Manet joined his desire with Nature's. I remember his saying as he showed me some illustrations he had done for Mallarme's translation of Edgar Poe's poem, "You'll admit that it doesn't give you much idea 'of a kingdom by the sea.'" The drawing represented the usual sea-side watering place—the beach with a nursemaid at full length; children building sand castles, and some small sails in the offing. ”

“ However, despite Manet’s failure to attain pliability, these early paintings are, in every way, sincere efforts toward the creation of an individual style. It was only later, after his first intoxicating taste of notoriety, that the arriviste spirit took possession of him and69 led him to that questionable and unenviable terminus, popularity. One can imagine him, drunk with eulogy, reading some immodest declaration of Courbet’s in which was set forth that great man’s egoistic confidence, and saying to himself: “Tiens! ”

“ While the Romanticists, as sons of a flaccid, inactive period, lashed themselves into enthusiasm for the passion and wild life of the East, Guillaumet, the child of a hurried and neurotic epoch, sought here an opiate for his nerves. Where they saw contrasts he found harmony; and he did not find it, like Fromentin, in what is understood as chic. Manet’s conception of colour had taught him that nature is everywhere in accord and harmoniously delicate. ”

“ In 1863 he married Mlle. Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch lady of great musical talent. From one point of view 1863 was disastrous, from another triumphant. Hitherto a man of promise, Manet now developed into a man of notoriety.
The little “one-man show” at the gallery of M. Martinet, Boulevard des Italiens, presaged the coming storm. Manet exhibited the Spanish Ballet, Music at the Tuileries, Lola de Valence, and nearly the whole of his other work up to that date. Baudelaire was enthusiastic. Verses on Lola de Valence are enshrined in “Fleurs de Mal.” Other critics were not so kind. ”