Édouard Manet

Manet was the consummate Parisian dandy—a wealthy bourgeois who painted in a tailored suit, a silk top hat, and yellow gloves. He lived a short walk from his successive Paris studios, maintained a regular daily schedule, and attended the Café Guerbois and the Nouvelle-Athènes in the evenings as part of his social and intellectual routine. The studio was a workplace. The café was where the aesthetic conversation happened.

His working method was built on high-intensity short sessions with the model physically present. Unlike the Impressionist plein-air practice of working fast against moving light, Manet worked fast against the limited patience of the sitter. Portrait sessions were scheduled in strict blocks, and Manet feared chronically that the sitter would "let him down" before he could catch the painting in a single decisive pass. Antonin Proust's memoir records that Manet attempted his 1880 portrait of Proust "on unprepared white canvas in a single sitting."

When a canvas did not come together on the first or second session, Manet scraped it. He was famously willing to destroy a day's or a week's work rather than glaze corrections on top. Proust records that the final Proust portrait was the eighth or ninth attempt—the previous canvases had been scraped and started again. The first-shot-or-scrape method is the defining procedural habit.

His subjects were modern Paris: the cafés, the Tuileries, the railway stations, the Folies-Bergère, the brothels, the boating parties at Argenteuil. He was Baudelaire's painter of modern life—the painter the poet had been theorizing through the 1860s before Manet became its decisive example. His studios in the Batignolles quarter and later at the Rue d'Amsterdam and the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg were designed around the production of life-size portraits and figure paintings, with consistent north light, neutral walls, and careful control over the studio props and costumes.

Manet's technical contribution to modern painting was the systematic popularization of alla prima on a light ground—the method the Impressionists then took in different directions. He did not invent alla-prima oil painting (Hals and Velázquez had worked that way two centuries earlier) but he was the painter who made it the defining method of modern Paris.

His canvases were commercially prepared fine linen, primed with a light-toned ground—white or cream. For certain works he left sections of the canvas unprimed, painting directly on the raw fabric so the sized linen itself was the high value. The 2017 MDPI study of Woman in a Striped Dress has documented the minimal commercial priming Manet typically used, and the ground-showing-through technique in his painted highlights.

His palette across the mature career was a Spanish-influenced version of the Impressionist range. Ivory black was retained and used confidently—the Velázquez influence. Lead white, zinc white, yellow ochre, Naples yellow, vermilion, cadmium red, madder, carmine lake, cobalt blue, French ultramarine, cerulean, emerald green, and viridian. The palette shifts after about 1870 as the Impressionist influence entered his work: the black stays, but the overall chromatic key lifts and the brushwork becomes more broken.

His handling method was the "three strokes" finish Proust recorded. Manet famously told Proust he would finish a gloved hand with three brushstrokes—"pique, pique, pique"—rather than modeling the hand through blended tones. The summary notation is not a shortcut; it is a positive aesthetic argument that the specific flat contrast carries more information than the blended form. The academic critics of the Salon called this "lack of finish"; Manet held that the finished academic form was false to the way the eye actually reads modern life.

He used hog-bristle flats and rounds for the broad passes and soft sables for the fine edges. His medium was minimal—a little turpentine for thinning the initial block-in, and after that mostly pure oil color directly from the tube. He did not build up thick glazes or resinous layers. The finished surface is usually a single layer of direct color sitting on the light ground.

Manet's process was decisive, short, and structurally dependent on the capacity to destroy and restart.

First: the conception. Manet rarely made extensive preparatory studies for major works. The composition was usually decided in his head or in a small pencil thumbnail in a sketchbook before the canvas was approached. Preparatory oil sketches exist for some major works (Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Olympia, The Railway) but are not the common case.

Second: the first shot. The composition was placed directly on the prepared canvas in broad tonal blocks using a larger brush and thinned color. Manet's stated rule was "to get down what one sees at the first shot"—the initial confrontation with the model in paint, without drawing intermediaries.

Third: development in a single or small number of sessions. The major painting moves happened in the first one to three sessions. Manet judged the painting by whether the initial attempt had the "right pitch"; if it did, he continued, and if it did not, he scraped the canvas.

Fourth: the scrape-and-restart. Any canvas that lost its pitch was scraped down to the ground, sometimes within the same day, and started again from the first shot. Proust records this repeatedly for the major portraits. Manet preferred to destroy a good attempt and risk a better first-shot than to build a corrected painting on top of the problem.

Fifth: summary finish. The final passes placed the specific value and chromatic accents—the white of a collar, the black of a ribbon, the glove, the fan—in decisive single strokes. The "three strokes" principle. Manet held that the specific flat contrast read as the thing at a distance more truthfully than a blended form read at close range.

A painting was done when the pitch held and the summary accents were correctly placed. Manet's finished surface is often deliberately rough by academic standards; the academic "finish" was what he was specifically opposing.

Manet's references were simultaneously the modern Paris street and the Old Masters of the Louvre. He was a systematic copyist of the Spanish Baroque, particularly Velázquez, whom he visited at the Louvre repeatedly in the 1850s and 1860s and whom he traveled to Madrid in 1865 specifically to study. The letter to Fantin-Latour from Madrid in September 1865 calls Velázquez "the painter of painters"—the technical model Manet held above all others.

His compositional method frequently reworked Old Master sources. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) is a modern translation of Raphael's Judgment of Paris via Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving and a Giorgione pastoral. Olympia (1863) is a modern version of Titian's Venus of Urbino. The Spanish guitarist and the matadors of the mid-1860s are direct translations of Velázquez and Goya into contemporary Paris scale and light. The translation method is a deliberate argument: the heroic subjects of the Old Masters can and must be transposed onto modern bourgeois Paris.

He worked from life with professional models and with his personal circle. Victorine Meurent posed for Le Déjeuner, Olympia, The Railway, and others; Berthe Morisot (who later married Manet's brother Eugène) appears in The Balcony; Mallarmé, Zola, Clemenceau, and Proust sat for portraits. The modern-life references came from direct observation of the Paris he was living in. He used photography only sparingly, primarily as memory aid for street scenes he could not reconstruct from the studio.

Manet studied from 1850 to 1856 in the Paris atelier of Thomas Couture, the leading academic painter of the preceding generation. Six years is a serious apprenticeship; Manet mastered the fundamental academic drawing and composition skills there, and the technical grounding of the mature work is unmistakably Couture's. The relationship was adversarial on aesthetic grounds—Manet rejected Couture's idealized Romantic subject matter and polished surface—but the technical foundation held.

He was not a member of the formal Impressionist group and did not exhibit in the eight Impressionist exhibitions. His preferred institutional route was the official Salon, where his submissions were repeatedly rejected or scandalized (the 1863 Déjeuner sur l'herbe hung at the Salon des Refusés, the 1865 Olympia at the Salon proper, both to violent criticism). But he was the intellectual and technical center of the group—Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Morisot all looked to him as the elder modernist, and he influenced their work materially even as he maintained his own distinct project.

He took no formal students. His closest informal student was Berthe Morisot, who entered his circle in 1868 and whose work carries the clearest transmission of Manet's handling method into the Impressionist exhibition record. His posthumous influence was immediate and massive: the Fauves, the early Cubists, and the whole twentieth-century figurative tradition of Paris cite Manet as the decisive nineteenth-century bridge. Degas, Cézanne, and Seurat all worked with Manet's method as a reference point.