49 Fun Facts About Edouard Manet

Which novelist championed Manet in the press and sat for a portrait by him in 1868?

Émile Zola defended Olympia in print against its many critics, and in Manet's portrait of the young novelist a print of that scandalous nude hangs on the wall behind his desk.

Manet twice failed the entrance exam for which career?

Naval officer was the compromise: his father, a judge, wanted a lawyer and Manet wanted to paint. He sailed to Rio on a training ship, failed the navy's exam twice and got his way.

Under which academic painter did the young Manet train in the 1850s?

Thomas Couture urged his pupils to paint modern life, yet when Manet showed him The Absinthe Drinker he is said to have replied that the only absinthe drinker was the painter.

Which two Spanish masters and one Dutchman shaped Manet's early style?

Velázquez, Goya and Frans Hals: Manet met their work by copying in the Louvre and on trips abroad in the 1850s, and after a later visit to Spain he called Velázquez "the painter of painters".

At which 1863 alternative exhibition was Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe shown?

The Salon des Refusés was Napoleon III's answer to artists protesting that year's harsh jury. Crowds came largely to laugh, but the uproar made Manet's name.

What was the original title of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?

Le Bain, "The Bath", is how the 1863 catalogue listed it. The name pointed viewers to the woman wading in the stream behind, not to the picnic that caused the uproar.

Which Raimondi engraving after Raphael supplied the poses of the Déjeuner's main figures?

The Judgement of Paris, engraved about 1515 after a design by Raphael, gave Manet the grouping of his seated figures. He dropped a revered old-master pose into a modern picnic, and the clash baffled viewers.

Which American painter's canvas was the other sensation beside Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1863?

James McNeill Whistler showed Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, which London's Royal Academy had turned away the year before. It and Manet's picnic were the two most talked-about pictures in the show.

Which Titian painting supplied the pose for Olympia?

Venus of Urbino shows a goddess reclining for the viewer's pleasure. Manet kept the pose but painted a modern Parisian courtesan who stares straight back, and that is what outraged the 1865 Salon.

Who was Manet's model for Olympia?

Victorine Meurent posed for Manet for a decade, then took up the brush herself and went on to show her own paintings at the Paris Salon.

What animal stands at the foot of the bed in Manet's Olympia?

A black cat, back arched, takes the place of the sleeping lapdog in the Renaissance nude Manet was reworking. He swapped an emblem of fidelity for one that 1865 viewers linked with the night streets.

Who organised the 1890 public subscription that gave Olympia to the French state?

Claude Monet heard that Manet's widow might sell the painting to an American collector, so he spent a year raising the 20,000 francs she asked and offered the picture to the nation.

Which Paris museum holds both Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?

Musée d'Orsay, a converted railway station, now shows both pictures in peace. In 1865, by one friend's account, only the precautions of the Salon's officials kept Olympia from being slashed by angry visitors.

Which two of Manet's relatives posed for the men in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?

The right-hand man blends Eugène and Gustave; the other is Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff.

Whom did Manet marry in 1863, the piano teacher his father had hired for his sons?

Suzanne Leenhoff and Manet had been a couple for about ten years, kept quiet from his domineering father. They married only after the old man died.

Who was Léon, the boy Manet painted in Boy Carrying a Sword and Boy Blowing Bubbles?

His wife's son, perhaps his own: Léon was born eleven years before the wedding and passed off as his mother's little brother. Whether his father was the painter or the painter's father is still argued over.

Which painter became Manet's sister-in-law by marrying his brother Eugène in 1874?

Berthe Morisot is credited with coaxing Manet into painting outdoors. He painted her portrait again and again before the wedding, which has fed talk of a suppressed romance ever since.

Who was Manet's only formal student?

Eva Gonzalès joined his studio in 1869 and sat for the portrait he sent to the next Salon. She died in childbirth in 1883, within a week of her teacher.

What name was given to the circle of painters around Manet and Morisot?

Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Pissarro were drawn in through Morisot.

Why did Manet refuse to show with the Impressionists?

He preferred the official Salon and held that modern painters should win there, not walk away from it. He also had no wish to be seen as the spokesman of a group.

Which poet and which composer appear in the crowd of Manet's Music in the Tuileries?

Baudelaire and Offenbach stand among the painter's own friends and family, with Manet himself at the far left edge. Showing his social set in place of heroes so angered some visitors that they threatened the canvas.

Which two cities share Manet's Music in the Tuileries under a long-disputed bequest?

London and Dublin: Hugh Lane willed his pictures to London, switched to Dublin in a codicil nobody witnessed, then died on the Lusitania. Since 1959 the two galleries have settled the quarrel by taking turns.

Which Habsburg ruler's death by Mexican firing squad did Manet paint?

Maximilian was put on Mexico's throne by Napoleon III, who then pulled out his troops and left him to the firing squad. The pictures blamed the regime too plainly, and none could be shown in France.

Who tracked down and reassembled the cut-up fragments of Manet's large firing-squad painting?

Edgar Degas bought up the pieces after Manet's family had cut the damaged canvas apart and sold them one by one. London's National Gallery acquired his rescued fragments in 1918.

Prints from which country taught Manet the flat colour and abrupt cropping of pictures like Boating?

Japan had only lately opened to Western trade, and its prints fascinated the Paris avant-garde. Manet went as far as painting a Japanese print and a folding screen into the background of a friend's portrait.

Which American Civil War sea battle off the French coast did Manet paint in 1864?

Kearsarge v. Alabama: the Union warship sank the Confederate raider off Cherbourg in June 1864 while crowds watched from the shore. Working from press reports, Manet had his canvas in a Paris shop window within a month.

Which Paris station gives its alternative title to Manet's The Railway of 1873?

Gare Saint-Lazare is never actually shown. All Manet gives of the station is a cloud of white steam drifting behind the iron railings, while a woman and a child fill the foreground.

Which Washington museum owns Manet's The Railway?

The National Gallery of Art owes it to the Havemeyers, American collectors steered toward the Impressionists by their friend Mary Cassatt. They bought the picture in 1898, and the family gave it to the nation in 1956.

When Prussian armies besieged Paris in 1870, Manet stayed to serve in which force?

The National Guard kept Manet in the besieged city, serving alongside a fellow painter, while several of the friends who would become the Impressionists sat out the war in London.

Which London gallery holds Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère?

The Courtauld owes the picture to Samuel Courtauld, a textile industrialist who founded the art institute in 1932 and filled its gallery with his own Impressionist paintings.

Which composer first owned Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, hanging it over his piano?

Emmanuel Chabrier was one of Manet's closest friends and bought his pictures before they were fashionable. Half a century later a ballet set in the painting's bar was danced to Chabrier's own music.

The red-triangle bottles on the counter in Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère hold which British beer?

Bass pale ale wore a red triangle that became Britain's first registered trademark. Some see the choice of a British beer over a German one as a nod to French feeling after the war of 1870.

Which Spanish masterpiece is Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère often compared to for its mirror?

Las Meninas also turns on a mirror: the king and queen appear only as reflections, as if they stood where the viewer does. Michel Foucault opened his 1966 book The Order of Things with a study of the picture.

Which honour did Manet receive in 1881 after lobbying by a politician friend?

The Légion d'honneur was a prize Manet had long coveted, for all his battles with the art establishment. It reached him late: he was already seriously ill and had two years to live.

Gangrene cost Manet which limb, amputated shortly before he died in April 1883?

His left leg had turned gangrenous after years of worsening pain, and by the end he was confined to a wheelchair. The operation did not save him: he died in Paris within days, aged 51.

The pain and partial paralysis that crippled Manet's last years were a late effect of which disease?

Syphilis had reached his nervous system, a condition doctors of the day called locomotor ataxia. Manet himself blamed poor circulation and took water cures at a spa outside Paris.

What did Manet paint again and again in his final months?

Flowers in glass vases were what his failing strength allowed, small pictures he could still manage as his illness closed in. A painter, he said, can say all he wants with fruit, flowers or even clouds.

Which Poe poem did Manet illustrate in an 1875 French edition translated by Mallarmé?

The Raven came out in French as Le Corbeau, with Manet's lithographs set beside Mallarmé's translation. Poet and painter had become friends, and Manet painted Mallarmé's portrait the following year.

Which museum paid $65.1 million for Manet's Spring in 2014, then a record for the artist?

The Getty Museum paid nearly twice the top estimate. The picture of an actress posing as Spring was meant to open a set of four seasons shown as fashionable Parisiennes, but Manet lived to finish only two.

When a collector overpaid for his painting of a bunch of asparagus, what did Manet send him?

A picture of one more spear went to Charles Ephrussi, who had paid 1,000 francs for an 800-franc commission. Manet's note said: "There was one missing from your bunch."

Manet's alla prima method meant doing what?

Painting wet into wet means laying fresh colour over paint that has not yet dried, so a picture can be finished at a single sitting. The Impressionists took up the method.

Which Manet painting, shown at the 1869 Salon, poses three friends behind bright green railings?

The Balcony shows three friends who seem not to notice one another. Its vivid colours struck Salon visitors as a provocation, and one caricaturist's verdict was "Close the shutters!"

Which 1861 Salon painting, admired by Gautier, was Manet's first popular success?

The Spanish Singer won Gautier's praise for its true colour and bold brushwork, and young painters began calling at Manet's studio. It was his last Salon success for years.

As illness weakened him, Manet turned for his late portraits to which medium, easier to handle than oils?

Pastel was simply less demanding for a man who could barely walk, and he used it for a stream of small portraits of women friends. The catalogue of his work lists 89 pastels in all.

Unusually for a painter of modern life, Manet sent the Salons of 1864 and 1865 large pictures of whom?

Jesus Christ: The Dead Christ with Angels and Christ Mocked by the Soldiers are almost his only religious works, and the Salon crowds ridiculed both. Even his supporters were thrown by the change of direction.

Which demi-mondaine and salon hostess sat for seven late portraits by Manet in the early 1880s?

Méry Laurent, kept in style by a rich American dentist, ran a salon that drew the writers and painters of Paris. Manet cast her as Autumn in his unfinished cycle of the seasons, a picture she kept for life.

Banned in France, Manet's great firing-squad painting was first exhibited in 1879 in which city?

New York saw it first because the soprano Émilie Ambre took the canvas along on an American opera tour, and her lover arranged the show. Manet painted her as Carmen the following year.

Which schoolfriend of Manet's went on to become France's Minister of Fine Arts?

Antonin Proust stayed close all his life. He suggested the series of seasons that gave Manet his last Salon hit, and his memoir gave us many of the best-known stories about the painter.

Which establishment on boulevard de Rochechouart inspired Manet's At the Café (1878)?

Brasserie Reichshoffen fascinated him for the skill of its waitresses with a fistful of beer glasses. He began one large canvas of the place, then cut it in two and finished each half as a separate picture.