Manet in the Prado

Edouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 into a prosperous family. His parents, Auguste Manet and Eugénie-Desirée Fournier had three sons, of whom Manet was the eldest. At the age of twelve, he enrolled at the prestigious Rollin school where he became inseparable friends with Antonin Proust, the future Arts Minister and biographer of Manet. His interest in art began at this early age through the influence of his uncle, Edouard Fournier, who regularly took him to the Louvre and to Louis-Philippe's Galerie Espagnole which had been installed there in late 1848.

Having failed to gain entrance to Naval College, Manet convinced his parents to allow him to pursue his interest in art, and in 1850 he entered the painter Thomas Couture's studio, where he gained a solid training, also copying Old Masters in the Louvre, including works by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens, as well as other paintings at that period attributed to Velázquez. His first trips to Holland and Italy introduced him to Rembrandt and Frans Hals, as well as Titian and the Florentine Renaissance painters. During this period, Manet met Suzanne Leenhoff, his brothers' piano teacher and they were married in 1863. Her son, León Köella, was born in 1852, and was one of Manet's most important models.

In 1856 Manet became independent and rented his own studio, the start of a difficult artistic trajectory marked by failure, as the first painting that he submitted to the Salon,The Absinthe Drinker (1858), was rejected in 1859. Manet was a brilliant, highly cultured and refined man, who loved literature and music, and he gathered around him a circle of the leading literary figures of his day, including Baudelaire, Zola and Mallarmé, all of whom were firm defenders of his art, as well as painters such as Degas, Stevens, Fantin-Latour, and later on Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot, who married Manet's brother Eugène in 1874.

In 1861 Manet was awarded a medal for his painting The Guitar Player or The Spanish Singer (1860)*, an example of the contemporary vogue for Spanish subjects and characters currently prevailing in Paris, a trend which was heightened by the marriage of the Emperor Napoleon III to Eugenia de Montijo. In 1862 Manet's father died, leaving him a significant legacy which allowed the artist to devote himself to his work without financial anxieties and to pursue the path of modern painting, building up a circle of clients from 1871. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), rejected by the Salon, and Olympia (1865) are magnificent examples of his creative powers at their height, but they were also the target of enormous criticism when they were first exhibited. From 1862, Manet exhibited with various galleries and organised his own exhibitions, such as his "exposition particulière" at the Pont de l'Alma during the Universal Exhibition, and the one organised in his own studio. From 1879 he finally gained long-awaited recognition at the Salon.

Manet's trip to Spain in 1865 allowed him to develop his knowledge of work by Spanish artists such as El Greco, Goya and Velázquez. Following his visit to the Prado, Manet described Velázquez enthusiastically the "painter of painters". On his return to Paris, in addition to scenes of bullfighting, he painted a number of works of notably Spanish influence, including The Fife Player (1866)*, The Execution of Maximilian (1867)*, The Philosopher (1866-67)*, and The Balcony (1868-69)*.

In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War which began, Manet enrolled along with Degas in the National Guard. In a series of drawings, prints and lithographs he documented the repression of the Commune during the "Bloody Week" of May 1871. The works of his last decade, following a trip to Argenteuil with Claude Monet, are marked by his closeness to the Impressionists, despite the fact that he never took part in their exhibitions. Manet's interest in the Impressionist technique is evident in works such as Faure in the role of Hamlet (1876-77), as well as late works such as the Portrait of Madame Marlin, "The Lady in Pink" (1879-188)* and Autumn (1881)*. This was combined with his own unique aesthetic in his last major work, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82)*.

Manet died in Paris on 30 April 1883 widely recognised as the most innovative artist of the period.

*Work included in the exhibition Manet at the Prado.

Influenced by Baudelaire's thinking, Manet moved away from the outset of his career from the normal subject-matter of art such as allegory, mythology and history, to focus on the reality around him. He mixed classical compositions which scenes typical of his own day that the artist-flâneur (the idle but observant passer-by) could have seen on the streets and in the cafés and salons of Paris.

His first painting, The Absinthe Drinker (1858-59) represented, in the artist's own words, "a Parisian type", elevated, however, to become a symbol of the harshness of modern life. Other modern heroes of this type includeThe Street Singer (1862)* and the philosopher-beggars of slightly later (1866-67)*.

Manet paid a remarkable homage to middle-class society and cultural life in Paris under the Second Empire in his Music in the Tuileries (1862)*. This group portraits features artists, literary figures, musicians and leading politicians grouped together in Paris's most elegant gardens.

In his individual portraits such as Portrait of Emile Zola(1868)* and Portrait of Stephane Mallarmé (1876)*, Manet expressed the poetical, intellectual and worldly demands of the Parisian avant-garde through clear references to different cultures, such as those of Spain and Japan. At the same time, in works such as The Parisian (Study of Ellen André) (around 1874-75)* and Autumn he represented the exquisiteness of female fashion of the day in what are essentially portraits of clothes and furs worn by beautiful models who were well known in the Paris of their day.

To this all-encompassing vision of modern Paris, Manet added metaphors that represent fashionable bourgeois pastimes, such as the horse races, depicted in his lithograph Horse Races at Longchamp (1865-72)*, Skating(1877), Masked Ball at the Opera (1873-74), and the cafés-concerts, such as Corner of a Café and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82)*. The paintings View of the Universal Exhibition of 1867 (1876)* and The Railway(1873)*, the latter representing the Gare Saint-Lazare, are symbols of urban and industrial progress.

*Work included in the exhibition Manet at the Prado

Detail Beaudelaire's Mistress Reclining Enlarge

Detail Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé Enlarge

Detail The Parisienne Enlarge

Detail The Street Singer Enlarge

Detail Corner of a Café-Concert Enlarge

At the end of 1865, Manet travelled to Madrid to study the work of Velázquez, one of the painters whom he had most admired from the outset of his career. The trip was also the result of the French interest at the time in all things Spanish, reflected in the marvellous collection of Spanish paintings belonging to King Louis-Philippe. At the 1862 Salon Manet was awarded a medal for The Spanish Singer (The Guitarrero)*. Such subject matter continued to be present in his work of the following years, for exampleMlle. V... in the Costume of an Espada (1862)*, The Spanish Ballet (1862)*, Lola de Valence (1862-63), and Angelina (1864)*.

In the splendid Gran Hotel de Paris located on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Manet met Théodore Duret, a cognac manufacturer and trader, and future patron of the artist, whom Manet would paint in 1868*. Together they visited Toledo to see the work of El Greco, and the two men travelled back to France together ten days later. On Friday 1 September Manet and Duret visited the Real Museo de Pintura y Escultura, whose main galleries had recently been restored and rehung by the director Federico de Madrazo. There, Manet admired The Executions on Príncipe Pío: 3 May 1808 by Goya, a work that he would later draw on for his great contemporary history painting, The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867). In fact, the painting by Goya that Manet most admired was the Clothed Maja, exhibited at that time in the San Fernando Royal Fine Arts Academy.

(1) Menipus of Diego Velázquez Enlarge

(2) The Philosopher Enlarge

(3) The Pifer Enlarge

(4) Pablo de Valladolid of Diego Velázquez Enlarge

Among the paintings by Velázquez, most of which were at that date hung in the Galeria Principal in the Prado, Manet was particularly influenced by the Aesop and Menippus, figures that he would later reinterpret as modern beggar-philosophers and Parisians in his series ofPhilosophers(1865-67)*. Manet also discovered in the Prado the painting that he considered the finest he had ever seen: Velázquez's Pablo de Valladolid. The concept of the figure dressed in black and isolated against a luminous, undefined space would be used by Manet at a later date and expressed in an Impressionist technique in a series of images of universal resonance such as The Fifer (1865-66)*, his versions of the Portrait of Faure as Hamlet (1875-76)* and The Parisian (1875-76)*.

*This work is included in the exhibition Manet at the Prado

**The origins of the present-day Museo del Prado

The portrait is the pre-eminent genre in Manet's work, and the key vehicle through which he expressed his aesthetic principles. In these works, Manet went beyond a realistic likeness or a representation of the sitter's character, to convey, in the manner of a dialogue between painter and model, his own thoughts, imagination and ideas, creating a world that summed up the avant-garde modern art of his time.

Manet's portraits, which break away from conventional formats, convey a universal and autobiographical meaning, as in the eloquent Portrait of Manet's Parents(1860)*, in which the colours of the embroidery threads in his mother's work basket seem to symbolise the art of painting.

In his elegant portraits of friends, literary figures and politicians, Manet always established a dialogue between the model and the artist through visual allusions in the pose of the figure itself, the backgrounds and through objects and flowers, thus also creating a subtle relationship with the spectator. Examples of such allusions might be the ideological strength of purpose expressed in his Portrait of Clemenceau at the Tribune (1879-80)*, and the devotion to art and intellectual thought in his portraits of Zacharie Astruc (1866), Emile Zola (1868)*, Théodore Duret (1868)*, Stéphane Mallarmé (1876)* and Eva Gonzáles in front of an Easel (1870).

In his famous portraits of actors such as The Tragic Actor (Rouvière in the Role of Hamlet) (1865-66)*, the Portrait of Faure in the Role of Hamlet (1877)* and Emilie Ambre in the Role of Carmen (1880)*, all shown on stage, Manet conveyed the performer's commitment to his or her art, thus expressing a personal and profoundly felt allegory on the worth and liberty of the modern artist.

Other models, most of them belonging to Manet's own literary and artistic circles, reappear in various paintings, personifying the elegance of urban fashion in Paris, such as Berthe Morisot with a Bunch of Violets (1872)*, Woman with Fans (Portrait of Nina de Callias) (1873-74)*, and thePortrait of Madame Marlin or "The Lady in Pink" (1879-81)*. Equally refined portraits of couples or groups, such as In the Conservatory (1879)* and The Balcony (1868-69)*, complete the artist's cosmopolitan vision at the start of a new era in modern culture.

*work included in the exhibition Manet at the Prado

Drawings and watercolours

The earliest drawings that have survived by Manet reflect his interest in the classical figure and in the Renaissance architectural motifs that he studied in Florence. Fountain with Triton (1857)* and Interior of a Renaissance Building with a Staircase and Arcades (1857) are studies of perspective and of the play of light and shade, abstracted to a remarkably modern degree.

Manet also built up a wide repertoire of figures for his compositions in oil through his numerous copies of Old Master paintings in the Louvre, of Italian drawings in the Uffizi and above all of Florentine Renaissance frescoes, such as the Silentium (1862-64)* by Fra Angelico, Saint Luke (1857)* by Rodolfo de Ghirlandaio, Two Women(1857)* by Andrea del Sarto and others. In these drawings Manet focused on the most expressive and characteristic details of the figures, such as the turn of the head of the Woman seen from Behind with Pitchers of Water (1857)* by a follower of Raphael, and the gesture of the Chrysippus (around 1858-60)*, a copy of a Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre.

Manet used some of his drawings and watercolours as preparatory studies for his oils, in which he took the technique to new levels of expressiveness, for example in his Study of a Female Nude for 'Olympia' (around 1862-63) in which the figure remains unfinished and without a face. These studies also reveal his ideas and intentions, such as the Study for 'Christ mocked by the Soldiers'(1864)*. Other depict scenes of popular life and amusements observed by Manet in the streets and gardens of Paris and drawn directly from life, such as theBear Trainer (1862)*, The Saltimbanques (1862)* andGarden of the Tuileries (1862)*. Through such works, Manet built up a repertoire of impressions that he later incorporated in his finished compositions on Parisian subjects painted in the studio.

Prints

Manet was one of the first artists to use the medium of printmaking - etching, aquatint and lithography - in a new way. He experimented with papers of different colours, thicknesses and manufacture and with the tonal contrasts of black and white which he used to capture the essential volume of a figure, defined perfectly through light and shade, for example the Infanta Margarita of Austria, by Velázquez (1861-62)* and Philip IV, a copy after Velázquez (1862)*. As he did with oil, Manet also used aquatint in a new, highly modern way, mixing other techniques and including elements from Japanese art, for example, Cat and Flowers (1869)*, in which he adds shadows in dark wash to give greater life and depth to the composition.

Manet also followed the tradition of producing prints of his paintings for publication, for example the eight Etchings published in the Edition by Alfred Cadart (1862)*. However Manet used these prints to rework his painted compositions, making them still more expressive, for example, the Little Cavaliers (1862-62)*, coloured in watercolour, and the etching of Olympia (1867)*, in which the artist emphasised still further the classical beauty of the main figure.

*work included in the exhibition Manet at the Prado