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Edouard Manet, Part 1

© Nick Burton

Edouard Manet was born on January 23, 1832, in Paris. His father, Auguste, was a senior official at the Ministry of Justice and his mother Eugenie-Desiree was the daughter of a diplomat. Although his parents had wished a more traditional vocation for their son such as law or military service, Edouard quickly took to painting. His schoolmate and life-long friend Antonin Proust wrote that Edouard spent more time drawing than on his studies. His mother's brother, a Colonel Fournier, who was an aide-de-camp to the Duc de Montpensier, often took the young Manet to the Louvre.

In 1848, at the age of 16, Manet, after finishing his schooling at the College Rollin, enlisted as a cabin boy on the cadet ship "Le Havre et Guadeloupe." He traveled on it for six months, going as far as Rio de Janerio. After his travels, he rebelled against going to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and decided to take lessons form Thomas Couture, who had made a splash at the 1847 Salon with his painting of decadent Romans.

The young Manet was obsessed with realism, while Couture was more traditional, and there were temper flare-ups between them. Still, Manet remained in Couture's studio from 1850 to 1856. Almost nothing remains from those years, but Manet was even then working on a technique that followed the methods practiced by the Dutch and the Spanish.

From about 1850 to 1859, Manet traveled a great deal. In 1859, he visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where he studied the works of Rembrandt and Frans Hals, the latter artist having an almost profound effect on Manet. IN 1853, he visited the great galleries of Prague, Dresden, Vienna and Munich. He spent a week in Florence, Italy the same year, and he copied Titian's "Venus of Urbizo", which was later seen as a model for his infamous "Olympia".

Manet left Couture's studio in 1856, and moved into his own studio in the Rue Lavoisier, beginning to work on "Moses Saved from the Waters," which later became "Nymph Surprised" (1859-61), a work largely inspired by Rembrandt's "Bathsheba." which hangs in the Louvre. He also made "The Absinthe Drinker" (1859), a work that became Manet's first to be refused by the Salon.

In 1861, Manet submitted hid first great success to the Salon, "The Spanish Singer" (1860), which caught the eye of the critics as well as the public. In 1863, Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff, and at the same time , Napoleon III's Minister of Fine Arts, Nieuwerkerke, opened an exhibition that featured works that had been refused by the Salon in order to showcase the artists who had become discontented with the Salon. The painting Manet decided to show at this exhibit was "Le Dejurner sur L'Herbe."