He was far less reliant on plein-air technique than most of the Impressionists, and, whereas artists such as Monet used loose, visible brushstrokes and blended color palettes to depict subtle tonal effects, Manet preferred sharper outlines and exaggerated color contrasts, often placing dark and light areas close together (as in the contrast between naked flesh and shadow in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe). Similarly, although he was friendly with the Impressionists and exhibited with them - and is now often presented as one of them - his style was in some ways very different to theirs. The great irony of Manet's reputation as a controversialist is that, throughout his life, he both sought and achieved mainstream success, generally having more work displayed at the official Paris Salons than his younger Impressionist peers.

In terms of age, he found himself sandwiched between the generation of the great Realists, such as Gustave Courbet, and the Impressionists, most of whom were born in the 1840s. Édouard Manet was born in 1832 into an upper-class family with strong cultural and political ties. By removing the female nude from the legitimizing contexts of mythology and orientalism, and in making his female subject confront the viewer assertively with her gaze, Manet hit a nerve in the bourgeois culture of 1860s Paris, and set the wheels of the avant-garde in motion. The painting depicts two fully clothed men picnicking with a nude woman, while another scantily clad woman bathes in the background. Rejected from the Paris Salon in 1863, it became the most controversial of the works displayed in the so-called 'Salon des Refusés' held the same year in order to placate artists rejected from the main exhibition. But it also earned Manet fame and patronage. It caused outrage with its frank depiction of nudity in a contemporary setting and was scorned by the high-minded salon juries and middle-class audiences of the era. The works that focused on scenes of public leisure - especially scenes of cafés and cabarets - often conveyed the new sense of alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first modern metropolis.Įdouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) was probably the most controversial artwork of the nineteenth century. Impressionism records the effects of the massive mid-19 th-century renovation of Paris, led by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city's newly constructed railway stations wide, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded streets and large, deluxe apartment buildings.Their art did not necessarily rely on realistic depictions. The Impressionists sought to capture the former - the optical effects of light - to convey the fleeting nature of the present moment, including ambient features such as changes in weather, on their canvases. Scientific thought in the Impressionist era was beginning to recognize that what the eye perceived and what the brain understood were two different things.Getting away from depictions of idealized forms and perfect symmetry, they concentrated on the world as they saw it, which was imperfect in a myriad of ways. Picking up on the ideas of Gustave Courbet, the Impressionists aimed to be painters of the real: they aimed to extend the possible subjects for paintings.For this reason, many critics faulted Impressionist paintings for their unfinished appearance and seemingly amateurish quality. They abandoned traditional three-dimensional perspective and rejected the clarity of form that had previously served to distinguish the more important elements of a picture from the lesser ones. The Impressionists used looser brushwork and lighter colors than previous artists.All of these moves predicted the emergence of modern art, and the whole associated philosophy of the avant-garde.

The Impressionists also rejected official exhibitions and painting competitions set up by the French government, instead organizing their own group exhibitions, which the public were initially very hostile to. This often meant using much lighter and looser brushwork than painters had up until that point, and painting out of doors, en plein air. Instead, as their name suggests, the Impressionists tried to get down on canvas an “impression” of how a landscape, thing, or person appeared to them at a certain moment in time. They weren’t interested in painting history, mythology, or the lives of great men, and they didn’t seek perfection in visual appearances. At some point in the 1860s, a group of young artists decided to paint, very simply, what they saw, thought, and felt. Impressionism is perhaps the most important movement in the whole of modern painting.

Claude Monet Impression Sunrise 1872