CHAPTER III · EDOUARD MANET (1832-1883)
“CE QUI ME FRAPPE D’ABORD DANS CES TABLEAUX, C’EST UNE JUSTESSE TRÈS DÉLICATE DANS LES RAPPORTS DES TOUS ENTRE EUX.
“TOUTE LA PERSONNALITÉ DE L’ARTISTE CONSISTE DANS LA MANIÈRE DONT SON ŒIL EST ORGANISÉ: IL VOIT BLOND, ET IL VOIT PAR MASSES”
ZOLA
FOR over twenty years the technique and methods of Edouard Manet were a subject for the most virulent debate. His art, in fact, became the scene of a battle in which every painter in Europe had a hand. Officialdom found no place for him in its heart, no matter whether the State was Imperial or Republican. The Empress Eugénie once asked that his pictures might be removed from public exhibition; President Grévy demurred when the artist’s name was placed on the list for the Legion of Honour. Clearly this man was no supporter of the established order of things. Refused recognition as an artist by the school of tradition, disowned by his own teacher, a source of hilarity to the public, Edouard Manet caught but a glimpse of the long-wished-for land of success which he was fated never to enjoy fully.
The battle is not quite finished, and the rout of the old school continues to the present day. One result remains. Manet has had a greater influence upon the art of the last forty years than any other master during that period, and the standard which he raised has become a rallying-point for the greatest painters of the present age.
Edouard Manet was born in Paris on January 23, 1832, at No. 5, Rue des Petits Augustins. Thirty-six years previously Corot was born round the corner, in the Rue du Bac. To-day the Rue des Petits Augustins is a long street running through the Latin Quarter, southwards from the Seine and the Louvre, known as the Rue Bonaparte. It has become the chief mart for commerce in artists’ materials, photographs, pictures, and all the odds and ends which fill up a studio. With a quaint appropriateness, the birthplace of Manet faces the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts.
The boy was the eldest of three brothers. His father was a judge attached to the tribunal of the Seine, and the family had been connected with the magistrature for generations. First a pupil at Vaugirard, under the Abbé Poiloup, Manet then entered the Collège Rollin, took his baccalaureate in letters, and grew into an elegant man of the world. But his inclinations clashed with his duties, and his uncle, amateur artist and colonel in the artillery, taught him how to sketch in pen and ink. M. Antonin Proust describes the result in a recent magazine article.
“From earliest years,” he writes, “Manet drew by instinct, with a firmness of touch and vigour unexcelled even in his latest works. His family was intensely proud of the boy’s uncommon gift, and his artistically-inclined uncle, Colonel Fournier, supported him against his father, who—despite his admiration—had other views as to his son’s career.”
“One should never thwart a child in the choice of his career,” said Colonel Fournier.
“If,” replied the father, “the boy is not inclined towards the ‘Palais,’ let him follow your example and become a soldier; but go in for painting—never!”
A studio-stool tempted the boy far more than a probable seat on the Bench. If he had to waste time, it should not be in the Salle des Pas Perdus.
His parents sent him, towards the close of his school-days, upon a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, hoping that travel might distract his mind from thoughts of an artistic life. It is said that they contemplated a naval career. Charles Méryon, it may be remembered, made the voyage round the world in a French corvette before he took up the etcher’s needle. Like Méryon, Manet improved his draughtsmanship, although a sailor. He sketched incessantly. One day the captain asked him to get out his paints and touch up a cargo of Dutch cheeses, which had become discoloured by the sea. “Conscientiously, with a brush,” says Manet, “I freshened up these têtes de mort, which reappeared in their beautiful tints of violet and red. It was my first piece of painting.”
His voyage in the Guadeloupe ended, he returned home with unaltered determination. After some protest his father relented, and in 1850 Manet entered the studio of Thomas Couture.
THE GARDEN · EDOUARD MANET
Couture occupied a leading position in that group sometimes called the “juste milieu.” Between the Romanticists and the Classicalists his preferences perhaps were for the latter. Of extreme irritability in temper, with a deep contempt for those in authority, he combined a keen desire for success both popular and financial. His picture, The Romans of the Decadence, in the Salon of 1847, brought both, and for a few years he remained one of the most celebrated artists in France. Then he criticised Delaroche, with the usual result when one painter puts another right: he offended King Louis-Philippe, he insulted the Emperor Napoleon III. Kings must be taken at their own valuation, if one wishes to enjoy their good graces. It was not surprising that Couture ultimately became a disappointed and forgotten man.
He has been called an Apostle of Classicalism. Taught first by Baron Gros, who vacillated from one school to the other, and afterwards by Delaroche, who endeavoured to reconcile the opposing parties, Couture could hardly have taken any other position in the art world of the ’forties. “He was apart among the painters of the day, as far removed from the cold academic school as from the new art just then making its way, with Delacroix at its head. The famous quarrel between the Classical and Romantic camps left him indifferent. He was of too independent a nature to follow any chief, however great.” This is the testimony of an American artist, Mr. P. A. Healy, who studied under Couture about the time Manet was in the atelier, and shows that the future Impressionist worked under a man by no means curbed by tradition. According to his pupil, Couture’s great precept was, “Look at Nature; copy Nature.” Manet’s doctrine was couched in almost the same words, “Do nothing without consulting Nature.”
We know that during the time Manet remained in Couture’s studio, master and pupil quarrelled incessantly. The reason usually given is that Manet would not respect tradition. But neither would Couture. “That in the captain’s but a choleric word, which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.” One was there to teach, the other to be taught. The temperaments of the two men were fundamentally different. The thick-set, scowling Couture, of shoemaker descent, would naturally rub against the grain of the rather dandified young scion of the magistrature. Couture hated the middle classes, and Manet belonged to the “haute bourgeoisie.” Manet’s family was legal to the bone, and Couture detested lawyers even more than he disliked doctors. With all these drawbacks Couture was admittedly the best teacher in Paris. Manet evidently recognised the advantage, for he remained in the studio for six years, until he was twenty-five years of age, although quite able to sever the connection had he wished.
Then came the “wanderjahre,” which commenced in 1856. Manet visited Germany, Holland, and Italy. In the Low Countries, Franz Hals exerted a great and permanent influence over the student; Rembrandt was copied in Germany; in Italy, Titian and Tintoretto received his homage. Dresden, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Venice and Florence were visited. Upon his return to Paris he copied assiduously in the Louvre, and it was in this wonderful gallery that he so thoroughly mastered all that a young painter could learn from the Spanish School. He did not visit Madrid until 1865. His Spanish subjects before that date were the result of a careful study of Velazquez and Goya in the National Collection and the visit of an Iberian troupe of players to Paris. In the Louvre he copied paintings by Velazquez, Titian, and Tintoretto.
Of living artists Courbet considerably influenced the first period of Manet’s activity. Ever on the fringe of Impressionism, although never in the group, Courbet was a romantically inclined realist who taught the younger men to turn to everyday life for their subjects. His canvases were full of colour; although they have sadly toned down in the course of time, owing to the curious and unsuccessful experiments he made in trying to combine his practice with his theories.
In 1859 Manet sent his work for the first time to the Salon. The Absinthe Drinker, strong, but reminiscent of Courbet, was rejected. The Salon was held every two years, and in 1861 both his contributions were accepted, one being a double portrait of his father and mother, the other a Spanish study called the Guitarero. For this Manet was awarded Honourable Mention, his first and almost his final official distinction, for he received no other until the year before his death, twenty-one years later. Working with tremendous energy in his studio in the Rue Lavoisier, Manet became the centre of a circle of friends which included Legros, Bracquemond, Jongkind, Monet, Degas, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, and Whistler. The Guitar-player was an undoubted success. “Caramba,” writes genial Theo. Gautier, “Velazquez would greet this fellow with a friendly little wink, and Goya would hand him a pipe for his papelito.” Upon the jury it is said that Ingres himself was flattering, and the mention honorable was ascribed to the lead of Delacroix. Couture’s sneer that Manet would become merely the Daumier of 1860 did not seem likely to be justified.
Manet was now engaged upon several pictures which must not be ignored. Music at the Tuileries (1861), refused at the Salon, was, as its name implies, an open-air study of the fashionable crowds gathered round the bandstand in the lovely gardens by the palace. The Street Singer is the earliest of the almost realistic renderings of everyday life which the Impressionists delighted in. A sad-faced girl (a well-known character of the day) standing with a guitar at a street corner; the type is the same to this hour both in London and Paris, one of the thousand wretched beings superfluous to a great city, at once its pleasure and its sport.
The Boy with a Sword, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, also belongs to this period. The picture is masterly. Inspired from Spain, it is, like most great paintings, full of simplicity, full of strength. The Old Musician is also extremely Spanish, with a haunting reminiscence of Los Borrachos by Velazquez (although Manet had not yet directly seen this canvas). A small group watches an old man about to play his fiddle. Some boys, a little girl with a doll (a figure very dear to Manet), a man drinking, a native of the Orient in a turban and a long robe, these form a straggling composition. The picture is a fantasy of a nation the painter loved but had never yet seen.
Two personal matters affected the life of Manet about this time. His father died, leaving him a considerable private fortune, thus making the artist financially independent of dealers and the ups and downs of public exhibition. In 1863 he married Mlle. Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch lady of great musical talent. From one point of view 1863 was disastrous, from another triumphant. Hitherto a man of promise, Manet now developed into a man of notoriety.
The little “one-man show” at the gallery of M. Martinet, Boulevard des Italiens, presaged the coming storm. Manet exhibited the Spanish Ballet, Music at the Tuileries, Lola de Valence, and nearly the whole of his other work up to that date. Baudelaire was enthusiastic. Verses on Lola de Valence are enshrined in “Fleurs de Mal.” Other critics were not so kind. M. Paul Mantz did not restrain his pen and referred to “a struggle between noisy, plastery tones, and black,” with a result “hard, sinister, and deadly,” the whole summed up as “a caricature of colour.”
The Salon of 1863, which followed, has become famous not through what it accepted, but by reason of what it refused. In a contemporary chronicle the most notable pictures of the exhibition are La Prière au Désert by Gustave Guillaumet, a Sainte Famille by Bouguereau, La Déroute by Gustave Boulanger, La Bataille de Solférino by Meissonier, and the Chasse au Renard by Courbet. With the exception of Courbet it is an academical list, although it is extraordinary how Courbet crept in.
The list of rejected artists is amazing. Like Herod’s soldiers, the jury seems to have been chiefly occupied in stamping out youth. Bracquemond, Cals, Cazin, Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J. P. Laurens, Legros, Manet, Pissarro, Vallon, Whistler, these and many others were thrown out. The work was too vigorously performed, and Napoleon III. authorised the opening of another gallery in the same building as the old Salon, known as the Salon des Refusés. The most striking canvas in this room was Manet’s first great work, the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Breakfast on the Grass), sometimes called Le Bain.
The painting challenged opposition on two separate grounds. The first was its subject; the second its technique. Between two young men stretched on the grass, wearing the black frock-coats of a latter-day civilisation, sits a nude woman drying her legs with a towel. In the background another woman “en chemise” is paddling in the stream. In defence of such a subject it is usual to refer to the painters of the Renaissance, who, without exciting angry comment, mixed draped and undraped figures in their compositions. There is a celebrated Giorgione at the Louvre to which none objected. Other times, other manners. Infanticide is not encouraged in England although it is the practice in China. Many social practices of the Renaissance, innocent enough in the eyes of that golden age, are distinctly discouraged by the criminal code of to-day. Forty years have elapsed since the Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was first exhibited, and Mrs. Grundy is not the power she was. But if any English painter hung a representation of two dressmaker’s assistants bathing in the Serpentine under exactly the same conditions as Manet depicted the little party at Saint-Ouen, there would be some sharp criticism.
It is far more pleasing to discuss Manet’s manner of painting. In a period when work was sombre in tone and Nature rapidly losing her place in art, Manet with his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, Olympia, and Le Fifre de la Garde, changed the current with startling directness.
PORTRAIT OF BERTHE MORISOT · EDOUARD MANET
In these and other canvases there was not a shadow, the surface being from end to end clear and highly coloured. Where a Classicalist would have rendered a shadow in the usual burnt umber, Manet made his tones a little less clear, but always coloured and always in value. His method of working was to discard all blacks and preparations of blacks. This was directly antagonistic to the teaching of Couture, who painted on a black canvas. Manet drew straight away on a white canvas with the end of his brush. Then, after having endeavoured to render with a single tone all the pale parts, he carried the lights right into the shadows, of which he studied the slightest nuance. The result was novel to the vision, and strange to the public. The Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was a masterly rendering of white flesh against black clothes, which was not appreciated because it was so foreign to the eye.
“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,”
is an excellent motto for painters who wish to achieve popular renown, but it was never the motto of Manet and the Impressionists.
To a certain extent the Salon des Refusés was successful. The jury of the old Salon had received a fright, and in 1865 they opened their doors very widely. Making a virtue of necessity, they reversed their policy and welcomed the whole artistic world, in order to obviate the necessity of a second Salon des Refusés.
Olympia was far in advance of anything the artist had yet attempted. In composition it recalls Velazquez, Goya, and Titian. A girl, anæmic and decidedly unprepossessing, quite nude, is stretched upon a couch covered with an Indian shawl of yellowish tint. Behind is a negress, with a bouquet of flowers. At the foot of the bed a black cat strikes a sharp note of colour against the white linen.
Gautier and Barbey D’Aurevilly—both men of exotic genius—received the painting with great favour. They found themselves alone in their opinions. Again the subject displeased the crowd, whilst the extraordinary technique exasperated the art world. Even Courbet, reformer as he was, repudiated it. “It is flat and lacks modelling. It looks like the queen of spades coming out of a bath.” Manet retorted: “He bores us with his modelling. Courbet’s idea of rotundity is a billiard-ball.” The general verdict, however, was one in which ridicule and mockery were equally mixed. A religious picture, Christ reviled by the Soldiers, received no greater encouragement, and in the next Salon Manet was rejected without mercy. Le Fifre de la Garde and The Tragic Actor were both refused. He had provoked such fierce animosity that he was even excluded from the representative exhibition of French art included in the Universal Exhibition of 1867.
Luckily, no longer dependent for money on his art, Manet was able to exhibit under more favourable circumstances. Like Rodin a few years ago, Manet opened a large gallery in the Avenue de l’Alma, which he shared with Courbet. Here he collected fifty works, including the Boy with the Sword, several Spanish subjects, seascapes, portraits, studies of still life, aquafortes, even copies. A catalogue was issued containing a short introduction. “The artist does not say to you to-day, Come and see flawless works, but, Come and see sincere works.” Another sentence shares with a title of Claude Monet’s the origin of the generic phrase, “Impressionism.” “It is the effect of sincerity to give to a painter’s works a character that makes them resemble a protest, whereas the painter has only thought of rendering his impression.” Manet never considered himself as a man in revolt.
The artist had now a considerable following, and was supported by several vigorous pens in the press, notably that wielded by Emile Zola, who had been introduced to Manet by an old school friend become artist, Cézanne. Zola’s campaign in 1866, following upon the rejection by the Salon of the Fifre de la Garde, saw some hard fights. Zola saluted Manet as the greatest artist of the age, and incidentally overturned a few pedestals in the Academy. Animosity directed against the artist was transferred to the journalist, and Zola was soon ejected from his position under M. de Villemessant as art critic to the Figaro (then famous as l’Événement). Artists of the old school used to buy copies of this journal containing the offending articles, seek out Zola or Manet on the boulevards, and then destroy the paper under their eyes with every manifestation of scorn.
About this time the gatherings in the Café Guerbois, in the Rue Guyot, behind the Parc Monceau, were held twice a week regularly, and the School of Batignolles became an established fact. The group was mixed, and held together more through comradeship than through identical aims. It included Whistler, Legros, Fantin-Latour, Monet, Degas (a young man fresh from the Ecole des Beaux Arts), Duranty, Zola, Vignaux, sometimes Proust, Henner, and Alfred Stevens. To these names should be added Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Bazille, and Cézanne. Monet had been attracted by Manet since the little exhibition at Monsieur Martinet’s in 1863, although they did not meet until 1866, the year that Camille Pissarro joined the camp. Fantin-Latour was an old chum, the friendship commencing in 1857, and he commemorated these gatherings in a picture of the members of the group, which attracted much attention in the Salon of 1870.
PORTRAIT OF M. P——, THE LION-HUNTER · EDOUARD MANET
The home life of Edouard Manet was strangely different from what one would expect of such an artist, so notorious in the Paris of the Empire that when he entered a café its frequenters turned to stare at the incomer. Manet lived with his wife and his mother in the Rue St. Pétersbourg. The old lady, faithful to her remembrance of the age of Charles X. and the Citizen King, lived amidst souvenirs of the past. Modernity was entirely absent from the little household, and those who anticipated evidences of the spirit of revolution which characterised Manet in the world of the boulevards here discovered the atmosphere, even the decoration and furniture, of the Louis-Philippe period. Romance had also entered into the hitherto prosaic Manet family. Mlle. Berthe Morisot, a clever young artist from Bourges, had married Manet’s brother Eugène, and became an ardent follower of her brother-in-law’s artistic doctrines, whom she aided frequently.
A famous work of this period is The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, the subject representing a file of dark-hued Mexicans shooting the unfortunate monarch. It is a vast canvas, slightly inconsistent with many of the artist’s theories. Not lacking in actuality (it was commenced within a few months of the event), it was of historical genre and painted in a studio from models, the face of the Emperor being copied from a photograph. Rarely, if ever before, seen in London, this magnificent painting was received enthusiastically when exhibited at the first collection made by the International Society in 1898.
In France the authorities forbade the public exhibition of the Execution, the tragedy having had too intimate a relation with French politics; but at the Salon of 1869 Manet was represented by The Balcony, which provoked considerable derision from critics and public.
The famous duel with Duranty took place early in the following year. Duranty, an old friend and journalistic supporter of the movement, of great literary reputation in the ’sixties and ’seventies, but quite forgotten now, suddenly published a newspaper article in which the artist was violently attacked. There was no palpable reason for such a strange outbreak, and at the next gathering at the Café Guerbois, Manet requested explanations. In his anger the artist struck the writer across the face. Manet had for seconds Zola and Vigniaux, and his adversary was slightly wounded in the breast. Within a few years Manet stretched out his hand in friendship, and the quarrel was made up and forgotten by both parties.
The tremendous upheaval of the year 1870 had its effect upon Manet’s art, as it had upon the whole national and intellectual life of France. It marks the end of his first period, for after the war Manet paid more attention to the question of lighting, and gathered closer to the little group of “Luminarists” of which Claude Monet was the most significant figure. Early in 1870 the artist, when painting near Paris, in the park of his friend De Nittis, for the first time woke up to the prime importance of working “en plein air.” The war intervened, and Manet served with the colours. After the campaign he returned to his easel, but no longer an exclusive follower of the Spanish School and the Romanticists of the type of Courbet.
At the call of their country, artists and authors alike followed the flag. One can still remember how short-sighted Alphonse Daudet kept sentry-go during the first awful winter, and how, almost at the end of the siege of Paris, the brilliant Henri Regnault was shot down in a sortie. Bastien-Lepage was in the field, and one of the group of the Café Guerbois, Bazille, was killed in action. Manet enlisted in the Garde Nationale, and, for some reason which is not obvious, was at once promoted to the Staff. Unfortunately, Meissonier was nominated Colonel of the same regiment, which shows that the État-Major was quite ignorant of the state of contemporary art. Meissonier, a man of strong opinions, the recognised head of his profession, member of the Institute, was covered with official honour. Manet, with equally forcible convictions, the hero of the Salon des Refusés, was pariah to the Academy. It was not likely that two such men could get on well together.
Some years afterwards Manet displayed his feelings. He was gazing in a public gallery at a Charge of Cuirassiers, recently painted by Meissonier. A crowd gathered round. His criticism was short. “It’s good, really good. Everything is in steel except the cuirasses.” The mot travelled round the town, and duly reached the ears of the venerable artist at Passy. Manet saw active service. He was under fire at the Battle of Champigny, and also took part in the suppression of the Commune. A vivid little sketch by Manet shows a Parisian street, after some sharp fighting with the insurgents. It may be found reproduced in Duret’s monograph. Broken down in health, Manet joined his mother and sister at their retreat in the Pyrenees, and at Oléron painted the Battle of the “Kearsage” and “Alabama,” a wonderful piece of sea-painting, although executed far from the actual scene of the engagement.
EDOUARD MANET
Manet had exhausted the paternal inheritance and was living on the fruits of his labour. The Impressionist School, as we now know it, was at the height of its activity, but by no means at the summit of its success. It assumed as its title the designation which had been applied to it as a nickname. The origin of this title is obscure. As already mentioned, Manet used the term in his introduction to the catalogue of 1867. Claude Monet named one of his pictures, a sunset, exhibited in the Salon des Refusés, “Impressions.” Ruskin though had used the same term years before in describing a canvas by Turner. Many of the members of the group were in the most abject poverty until the celebrated dealer, M. Durand-Ruel, came to their assistance. Manet had better sales than the rest of his brethren, for several collectors began to buy from his easel, viz. Gérard, Faure (of the Opera), Hecht, Ephrussi, Bernstein, May, and De Bellis. It is characteristic of the man that in his own studio he exhibited the works of his friends in order that the wealthy buyers he was beginning to attract should also invest in the productions of the less fortunate Impressionists.
In 1873 Manet contributed to the Salon a portrait of the engraver Belot seated in the Café Guerbois. Known as Le Bon Bock, it was his most popular success both with public and critics. Over eighty sittings were given before the canvas was completed. Manet had departed far from the technique of the Dutch portrait-painters, but Le Bon Bock strongly suggests the manner of Hals, although ranking on its own merits as an independent triumph. To the year of Le Bon Bock succeeded a long period of public indifference and artistic warfare. The Impressionists held their first collective exhibition, which was bitterly disappointing in its results. The public had changed but little. The Opera Ball and The Lady with Fans (about 1873), the Railway, painted wholly in the open air, and Polichinelle (exhibited at the Salon of 1874), The Artist and L’Argenteuil of 1875, all were received with disfavour.
It is extremely curious to note how canvases which appear to-day perfectly normal in their methods and aims positively outraged the feelings of critics thirty years ago. L’Artiste, a magnificent portrait of the engraver Desboutins, was refused by the Salon together with Le Linge. L’Argenteuil, a simple representation of two life-sized figures by the borders of the Seine, would be received with acclamation instead of disdain. Manet and his group were undoubtedly educating the public, but progress was very slow. There was an outburst of opinion in favour of the artist when the Salon refused L’Artiste and Le Linge. One sentence of criticism summed up the general feeling of those who were not entirely prejudiced against the new spirit. “The jury is at liberty to say that it does not like Manet. But it is not at liberty to cry ‘Down with Manet! To the doors with Manet!’”
Reaction on the part of the jury followed, exactly as it had followed in previous years. After the success of the Salon des Refusés Manet was accepted. Then, being rejected, he opened the gallery of the Avenue d’Alma, and was hung by the jury at the ensuing Salon. Rejected in 1876, the outcry in the press surprised the jury, who accepted his works in 1877. These extraordinary ups and downs culminated in 1878, when the jury of the Exposition Universelle, held in that year, definitely refused to hang any of his canvases. In the opinion of this jury the painter of Le Bon Bock was not a representative French artist. Ten years had changed the official art world but little, for the same thing had happened in 1867. This was almost the last insult Manet had to endure. In 1881 he received a second medal at the Salon. The discussion in the Committee had been acrimonious, but seventeen members of the jury were found to support the award. Amongst the names of the majority are those of Carolus-Duran, Cazin, Henner, Lalanne, de Neuville, and Roll.
One cannot deny that Manet’s work greatly varied. The portrait of M. Faure, in the character of Hamlet, was to a certain extent conventional studio-painting, and could offend nobody. The subject would not provoke the most susceptible. M. Faure was celebrated on the stage of the Grand Opera, possessed considerable wealth, and was one of Manet’s most devoted friends. Nana, sent to the Salon together with the portrait of M. Faure, was rejected. The technique was brilliant, but the subject, although harmless enough, suggested Zola’s heroine. Zola’s book was not published until 1879, but the name designated a class apart.
In 1880 Manet exhibited a wonderful portrait of M. Antonin Proust, and in the December of the following year his old friend, now Directeur des Beaux-Arts, was able to give to his life-long companion the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Had Manet no friends at Court, he would certainly not have received this coveted decoration. President Grévy objected when he saw the painter’s name, and would have struck out Manet from the list had not Gambetta exerted some little pressure.
But the struggle was nearly ended. Manet was dying. “This war to the knife has done me much harm,” he is reported to have told Antonin Proust. “I have suffered from it greatly, but it has whipped me up.... I would not wish that any artist should be praised and covered with adulation at the outset, for that means the annihilation of his personality.”
On New Year’s Day, 1882, he received the Cross, and at the Salon exhibited Un Bar aux Folies-Bergères, a barmaid enshrined amidst her glasses at a Paris music-hall, and a portrait, Jeanne. Since 1879 paralysis had been slowly sapping his powers. Edouard Manet died near Paris on April 30, 1883, at the early age of fifty-one. Disappointment, injured pride, lack of appreciation, continued and strong hostility, each had had its effect upon a physique always sensitive and never too strong. The artist had died for his art.
A GARDEN IN RUEIL · EDOUARD MANET
FISHING · EDOUARD MANET
The secret of Manet’s power is sincerity and individuality; his main effort was a rendering of fact; his deepest interest the truthful juxtaposition of values, the broad and simple treatment of planes, combined with a constant search for the character of the person or object portrayed.
The influences which guided Manet during the earlier portion of his career have been noticed at length. He travelled extensively, and his works bear many souvenirs of foreign masters. But sufficient stress is not always laid upon the influences at work around Manet in Paris, namely, the influences of Delacroix, Corot, and the men of 1830, who carried but one stage farther the methods and tradition of the English masters, Constable, Bonington, Girtin and Turner.
Apart from sources of inspiration Manet was personally gifted. He possessed (as M. Duret so well points out) the faculty of sight, a gift from Nature which cannot be acquired by will or work. Technique he had obtained after six years’ hard study in the most severe atelier in Paris. But technique is a subsidiary equipment, for a complete command over one’s materials does not always imply the possession of genius.
“The fools!” said Manet with bitterness to Proust. “They were for ever telling me my work was unequal. That was the highest praise they could bestow. Yet it was always my ambition to rise—not to remain on a certain level, not to remake one day what I had made the day before, but to be inspired again and again by a new aspect of things, to strike frequently a fresh note.”
“Ah! I’m before my time. A hundred years hence people will be happier, for their sight will be clearer than ours to-day.”
Ambition to rise, never to remain on the same level! That is the whole doctrine of art, and the supreme epitaph for Edouard Manet, pioneer and master.
GEORGES D’ESPAGNAT