Édouard Manet, born in 1832, was eight years older than Claude Monet. When Manet first encountered Monet, he thought Claude was stealing his (Édouard’s) thunder. But the confusion was eventually cleared up and they became good friends. Manet even created a garden scene of Monet with his family and recorded other instances of Monet at work.
What is the difference between Manet and Monet, aside from one vowel in their respective surnames? (And aside that both sported similarly styled beards as young men.) This is not a chicken and egg joke. Manet influenced Monet, but that’s not easy to see because of the differences in their respective choices of subjects and use of color.
Édouard Manet, 1875 (on the left)
Édouard Manet, Self Portrait with Palette, 1879 (on the right)
Claude Monet, 1899 (on the left) Claude Monet, Self Portrait in His Studio, ca.1884 (on the right)
Both had their paintings shown at the Paris Salon, a juried exhibit of works submitted by artists. And both were rejected by the Salon. The Salon was a big deal. (In 1874, as an example, there were over 1800 paintings exhibited.) The Salon was staid, so most of the paintings reflected historical and religious themes. And the jury was definitely conservative in its taste. Despite having paintings accepted, neither man ever received a medal or prize for his submissions.
The Painting Jury (Henri Gervex, 1885)
Paintings in the Salon were hung from ceiling to floor in alphabetical order. The submissions of the most prominent artists (or the most well connected) and those who had previously won prizes were usually hung at eye level. So the works of lesser known artists were usually located where they might be essentially invisible. Manet and Monet had the misfortune, because of the similarly of their names, of having their works hung side-by-side. This led to some confusion among the visitors to the 1865 Salon.
Since Édouard Manet initiated the break with classicism and influenced many of the impressionist artists who followed, let’s start with him.
Manet was born in Paris into a rich family. (That always helps an aspiring artist.) As a result, Édouard was never a starving artist living in a Paris garret. He initially enrolled at Collège Rollin because his father wanted him to study law. (The father was an official in the French Ministry of Justice.) When that didn’t pan out, his father encouraged Édouard to pursue a career as a naval officer, but he twice failed the training school’s entrance exam. So much for that idea. As a result, Édouard enrolled in Thomas Couture’s École des Beaux-Arts.
This school introduced him to then current artistic fashions. At that time, academic tradition focused on history, portraiture, landscape, and still life. Manet rebelled and took modern life (la vie moderne) as his subject. He wanted to portray his subjects as they really were (or, at least, how he perceived them) and not idealize them. He innovated the use of color and brushwork, and his approach subsequently became labelled “Realism”. (In fact, Manet adopted the then current style of realism that had been initiated by Gustave Courbet.)
The accepted (academic) approach to creating a piece of art was to lay down layers of dark paint on the canvas and then build up layers of lighter colors on top of them. Of course, the artist had to wait for each layer to dry before adding the next one. Finally, the finished piece of art was glazed to give the surface a smooth finish. (Brushwork was not to be visible.) Unfortunately, this process could take months. And all this work was done in a studio. One byproduct was that live models would not be continuously present. (The artist couldn’t afford to pay a model for all that down time. Besides, models had other lives and occupations.)
Manet preferred to paint from life, completing his paintings in one sitting. To achieve this, he did not paint in layers and did not glaze the finished canvas. Instead, he immediately chose the perfect colors for the scene (no subsequent second guessing). If he made a mistake, he scraped off the paint, down to the bare canvas, and then repainted that area. Also, he didn’t glaze the finished canvas; he wanted the brush strokes to be visible.
(The technique of scraping the canvas is described in the novel “Luncheon of the Boat People” by Susan Vreeland.)
As an aside, in the mid-19th century prior to Manet’s time, it was standard practice to execute a rough sketch of a landscape subject in the open air and then create the finished painting in the studio. This was simply a matter of convenience. Painters had to buy their colors as ground pigments that they then mixed with a medium such as linseed oil. The advent of tubes filled with prepared colors, as well as the invention of a portable easel, enabled artists to paint out-of-doors.
Manet's famous paintings, Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass, are examples of his techniques.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe ("Luncheon on the Grass", 1863, by Édouard Manet)
Part of the shock of this painting was the woman in the foreground staring brazenly out at the viewer. It put the viewer in the position of being a voyeur (or at least an intruder on what might be an intimate scene). Manet was believed to have been influenced by a Titan painting.
The Pastoral Concert (ca. 1510) by Titian
If The Luncheon on the Grass raised eyebrows, Olympia positively dropped jaws.
Olympia, 1863 (by Édouard Manet)
Here, again, Manet had presented a nude in a modern setting staring directly out at the viewer. Again, this painting was believed to have been inspired by a Titian work.
Venus of Urbino, 1534 (by Titian)
Needless to say, Manet’s approach to art didn’t sit well with the Salon.
Nudes in paintings were okay if they depicted mythological settings. But Manet’s inclusion of nudes in modern settings was outrageous and regarded as obscene. (In that regards, Parisians were not too different from their Victorian counterparts in England.)
So “The Luncheon on the Grass” (Dejeuner sur l’Herbe) was rejected by the Salon. However, it was rejected not because of the female nudes per se. No, it was their presence in a modern setting that included bourgeois, clothed men. This juxtaposition suggested that the women were not mythological goddesses but models or possibly prostitutes. (Tsk, tsk!)
Instead, Manet chose to display his painting at the Salon des Refuses, an alternative salon established for those who had been refused entry to the official one. (More about that below.)
The annual Paris Salon was considered the preeminent way for an artist to make himself known to the public. So Manet kept submitted his paintings to the Salon juries throughout his career. But only once, in 1861, did he receive the Salon’s honorable mention for a submission, a conventional piece titled The Spanish Singer. His hopes for continued early success went down the drain at the subsequent Salon of 1863. That year, more than half of the submissions to the official Salon were rejected—including those of Manet.
The narrow-minded attitudes of the Salon jury as well as the attendees was captured by Honoré-Victorin Daumier. He was a printmaker (among other things) who produced caricatures and cartoons that satirized the behavior of the French. He was an equal opportunity satirizer, attacking the bourgeoisie, the church, lawyers and the judiciary, politicians, and the monarchy. (He went a bit too far with the last of that list. He was jailed for several months in 1832 after publishing a particularly offensive depiction of King Louis-Philippe.) Several of his cartoons took on the Paris Salon.
"They refused this....ignoramuses!"
"Come on...don't be such a bourgeois...at least have a look at this Courbet!”
"Well, if you look very closely, you might end up finding some quality.
The color seems to be good."
The wags dubbed the 1863 Salon “The Salon of Venuses” due to the number of nudes that were on display. This included Alexandre Cabanel's Birth of Venus. (It’s now on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.) This work created a sensation., and it was quickly purchased by Napoleon III for his personal collection.
In turn, Daumier published a cartoon that poked fun at the reaction of the bourgeoisie.
"This year, Venuses....again."
Strictly speaking, Manet was not an Impressionist. But he did influence younger artists who did become associated with Impressionism, which brings us to Claude Monet.
Claude Monet was born in 1840—without a silver spoon in his mouth; he was the eldest son of a Parisian grocer. When Claude was five years old, his family moved to the Normandy coast, near Le Havre, where Claude’s father took over the management of the family’s ship-chandler (i.e., supplies and equipment for ships) and grocery business.
Le Havre is where it all began for Monet. He spent his childhood along the beaches—observing nature and the changes his surroundings went through over time—and this influenced his later approach to his art. It was here that he exhibited a flair for art. In his teens, he executed pencil sketches of sailing ships. He also earned coins with the sale of his caricatures. (He had a keen eye for detail, and his caricatures were well drawn.)
Claude met a local artist in Le Havre who introduced him to the idea of painting outdoors (en plein air). Manet used this approach throughout his artistic life as he depicted landscapes, the leisure activities in and around Paris, and the Normandy coast. Monet moved back to Paris in 1859 to undertake a career as a serious painter.
Monet elected not to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts. Instead, he chose to work at the Académie Suisse; this was an informal art school (operated by François Suisse), where Claude met Camille Pissarro.
If there’s one painting that kick-started the Impressionist movement, it was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. This was first shown in 1874 at an independent exhibition in Paris. This exhibition had been organized by Monet and other artists, including Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne. This show was presented as an alternate to the Salon.
Impression, Sunrise (1847, by Claude Monet)
An art critic, Louis Leroy, took issue with Impression, Sunrise. He published a diatribe in which he condemned Monet’s painting as nothing more than a sketch; Leroy said it was unfinished. He dubbed the whole show as “The Exhibition of the Impressionists.” Probably to Leroys surprise, Monet and his fellow artists embraced the term Impressionism as a description of their style of painting.
With this painting, Monet broke many of the conventions dictated by the Salon. Claude was deliberately trying to capture the sense of transient conditions of a seascape. He didn’t paint this in a studio; rather, he worked at the window of a room that overlooked the Le Havre harbor. He used quick brushstrokes so as to capture the scene at dawn before the light changed.
What Monet (and others) did was adapt and extend the “all at once” (alla prima) technique that Manet had pioneered.
Impressionism probably began to take shape sometime in the mid-1860s when the artists who would subsequently become known as Impressionists began meeting at the Cafe Guerois near Manet’s studio. Manet was the unofficial head of these semi-weekly meetings; the group included Monet, Renoir, Degas, Émile Zola, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, and George Seurat. (Seurat was later to become famous for his “pointillism” technique.)
However, the birth of Impressionism is usually traced to the earlier summer of 1869 when both Monet and Renoir painted a similar scene at a swimming resort at La Grenouillere on the Seine.
Bain à la Grenouillère ("Baths of La Grenouillère", 1869, by Claude Monet)
Monet’s painting depicts "Flowerpot Island", also known as the Camembert, and the gangplank to La Grenouillère, a floating restaurant on the Seine at Croissy-sur-Seine.
On that day, Monet was accompanied by Auguste Renoir, who decided to paint this scene at the same time.
La Grenouillère (1869, Auguste Renoir)
Whether deserved or not, Monet is usually regarded as the founder of Impressionism. Of all the artists who took modernism as a subject, he was certainly the most consistent throughout his long career. However, he would occasionally depict a more conventional scene. He did this when, in response to Manet’s 1863 painting, Monet created his own version of “Luncheon on the Grass” (without the shock value of Manet’s original).
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1866 (Claude Monet, Pushkin Museum in Moscow)
Monet was a master at capturing color; one example is one of his paintings of the Normandy coast.
Cliff at Varengeville, Normandy (1882, byClaude Monet)
He repeatedly returned to the same subject to explore the subtle nuances of light. This allowed him to depict mood fluctuations associated with changes due to time-of-day or the season. When painting a landscape, Monet would often carry several canvases with him so that he could capture the scene during the course of a day as the lighting changed
He looked at the colors of objects instead of the objects themselves. Later in life, Monet painted series of the same scene captured at different times of day. One example was his water lily series. To create Water Lilies (and other series of compositions), Monet worked in an enormous, light-filled studio that he had built at Giverny specifically to accommodate the multiple canvases he created in a series.
Waterlily Pond Green Harmony (1899, by Claude Monet)
Water Lilies (1916, by Claude Monet)
In total, Monet produced roughly 300 paintings depicting the water lily pond he had installed in his house at Giverny. The series captured the lily pond at different times of day, different seasons of the year, and from multiple angles.
Since the Salon figured so prominently in the art scene, let’s back up a minute to consider the blowback as artists’ attitudes changed. Between 1748 and 1890, the Salon was considered the biggest art event in the Western world; it was the official art exhibition of the Académie des BeauxArts. The Salon jury had a reputation for rejecting a high number of submissions each year. This reached a head in 1863 when the jury turned away roughly two-thirds of the submitted paintings.
As a result, there was uproar from the regular exhibitors who had been rejected. The Salon had rejected submissions from a who’s who of artists, including paintings presented by Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Camille Pissarro (to name a few). To cool public passions, Napoleon III ordered the formation of a Salon des Refusés.
Now this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Gustave Courbet (who is usually regarded as having initiated the realism movement of painting) had previously crossed swords with the old guard. This occurred at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, (a world’s fair). The jury had accepted a number of Courbet's works for the Exposition, but The Painter's Studio was rejected. It was regarded as too up-to-date. So, in an act of defiance, Courbet opened his own exhibition, which he called “The Pavilion of Realism,” near the official exposition; this, in a way, anticipated the Salon des Refusé. (Courbet, born in 1816, was 16-years Manet’s senior. Courbet was born in eastern France adjacent to the Swiss border and moved to Paris in 1839.)
L'Atelier du peintre. Allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique et morale (“The Painter's Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life”, 1855, by Gustave Courbet)
The center of the painting depicts Courbet painting a landscape of the Loue River valley ( in the vicinity of his home town), with a nude female figure (possibly his model), looking over his shoulder. The left side of the painting depicts people of everyday life in France. The right side of the painting depicts a large number of Paris élites, including friends of the artist.
(Maybe Courbet intended this painting to be a poke in the eye of the jury; the title alone sounds tongue-in-cheek.)
Our old friend, Honoré Daumier, entered the fray with a caricature that he titled Combat des écoles, L'Idéalisme et le Réalisme (Battle of the Schools—Idealism and Realism). In his 1855 lithograph, Daumier pictured a battle between the two rival artistic schools: neoclassical idealism versus contemporary realism. Realism is portrayed as working-class (rustic clogs and disheveled, ill-fitting clothes); Idealism is portrayed by athletic nakedness. Realism has a small, square palette; Idealism has a large oval-shaped palette (which serves as a shield). To balance things, Daumier gave Idealism an old-man’s face and eyeglasses. (I suppose that suggests that idealism is losing its vision.)
Combat des écoles, L'Idéalisme et le Réalisme (1855, (by Honoré Daumier)
So the Salon des Refusés ("exhibition of rejects" ) opened in May, 1863 containing a selection of the works that the Salon had rejected. This is sometimes regarded as the birth of the avant-garde. (Dates for these transitions are often fuzzy and subject to debate.)
The Salon des Refusés proved to be surprisingly popular. It was reported that more than a thousand visitors a day entered the exhibit. The journalist Émile Zola reported that visitors pushed to get into the crowded galleries where the refused paintings were hung. Manet seized the opportunity to exhibit Déjeuner sur l'herbe that had been rejected by the Salon.
It should be noted in passing that Paris art galleries mounted small, private exhibitions of works rejected by the Salon jurors. But these exhibits didn’t have the cachet or reach of the Salon. Private exhibits attracted far less attention from the press and patrons. The Salon could bring fame and fortune to the artists whose works were accepted by the jury of the Salon. That’s why there was a lot of backroom intrigue to get accepted and be given a prominent location in the galleries.
Sometimes provoking the Salon jury (and critics) could work to promote an artist’s fame. An example is Manet’s Music in the Tuileries.
Music in the Tuileries (1862, by Édouard Manet)
This painting received a lot of negative attention from both the public as well as professional critics. (What else is new?) Manet used his social circle for the figures in the painting. Among the figures in the gardens are the poet Charles Baudelaire, the musician Jacques Offenbach, members of Manet's family, other friends, and a self-portrait of the artist. (What? No gods or classical heroes? Quelle horreur!) Manet’s brushwork was also dismissed as crude and unfinished. Some viewers even threatened to destroy the painting. However, the sound and fury did have one positive outcome. The controversy made Manet a well-known name in Paris.
I mentioned at the beginning that Manet was a close friend of Monet and created a garden scene of Monet with his family as well as recording other instances of Monet at work. Here is the family scene.
The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil (1874, by Édouard Manet)
And here is Monet at work.
Monet in his Studio Boat (1874, by (Édouard Manet)
One way to compare Realism with Impressionism is to look at Manet’s and Monet’s approach to a subject: A solitary woman in this case.
On the left is Woman with a Parasol (1875) by Claude Monet. On the right is The Plum Brandy (1877) by Édouard Manet. Monet’s figure is full of light and swirls of color, almost ethereal; the woman might be anywhere, perhaps not even of this world. Manet’s figure is defined by certainty of place and perhaps somewhat pensive; she has a plum brandy on the table before her and a cigarette in her left hand; she appears to be staring off into space. She could be a shop girl resting after work; or she might be waiting for her lover. Who knows?
And finally, I’ll close with Manet’s last painting. (He died in 1883 at the age of 51. Monet was more fortunate; he died in 1926 at the age of 86, working away on his water lily series.)
Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère ("A Bar at the Folies-Bergère")
Édouard Manet's final major work, painted in 1882
Again, Manet has created certainty of place. At first, the perspective threw me off, but after some digging, I learned that he has played a trick on us. A full length mirror is behind the barmaid. We see the reflection of her back in the mirror. The gentleman in the top hat is looking at her, but he’s actually situated outside the frame of the painting to our right. So all we see is his reflection. (And she seems bored.)