Édouard Manet valuation
Painted modern Paris against the Salon's grain, and made Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia the start of modern art.
Édouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832 into a prosperous family; his father, a judge, expected him to study law, and after an attempt at a naval career he trained with the academic painter Thomas Couture from 1850 to 1856.
What a work by Édouard Manet is worth
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Bio
Édouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832 into a prosperous family; his father, a judge, expected him to study law, and after an attempt at a naval career he trained with the academic painter Thomas Couture from 1850 to 1856. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, refused by the Salon, was shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and Olympia caused a scandal at the Salon of 1865. He painted contemporary life, from cafés and the races to the bar at the Folies-Bergère, in a direct style with flat areas of colour that the younger Impressionists took as their lead, but he kept to the Salon and never showed at their independent exhibitions. He married the pianist Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863 and died in Paris in 1883, aged fifty-one.
Most of Manet's major paintings are in museums and oils come to market rarely; pastels, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially the etchings and lithographs, appear more often. The references are the catalogue raisonné of the paintings by Rouart and Wildenstein and Jean Harris's catalogue of the prints, and a work is expected to appear in them.
The Salon des Refusés, Olympia and the Folies-Bergère
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, his last major painting, was shown at the Salon of 1882 and is in the Courtauld Gallery in London. Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe are in the Musée d'Orsay.
In his last years, too ill to work on large canvases, he painted small still lifes of flowers. About twenty are known, the last from March 1883.
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