In one of these, “The Picnic,” painted in 1863, there was a stretch of sward, a few trees, and in the background a river in which a woman was merrily splashing in her chemise; in the foreground were seated two young men in frock-coats opposite another woman, who has just come out of the water and been drying herself. Needless to say, this picture was rejected as something unprecedented, by the committee, which included Ingres, Léon Cogniet, Robert Fleury, and Hippolyte Flandrin. Eugène Delacroix was the only one in its favour. So Manet was relegated to the Salon des Refusés, where Bracquemond, Legros, Whistler, and Harpignies were hung beside him. This Exhibition was held in the Industrial Hall, and the public went through a narrow little door from one gallery to the other. Half Paris was bewildered and discomposed by these works of the rejected; even Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie ostentatiously turned their backs upon Manet’s picture when they visited the Salon. This naked woman made a scandal. How shocking! A woman without the slightest stitch of clothes between two gentlemen in their frock-coats! In the Louvre, indeed, there were about fifty Venetian paintings with much the same purport. Every manual of art refers to “The Family,” as it is called, and the “Ages of Life” of Giorgione, in which nude and clothed figures are moving in a landscape and placed ingenuously beside each other. But that a painter should claim for a modern artist the right of painting for the joy of what is purely pictorial was a phenomenon that had never been encountered before. The public searched for something obscene, and they found it; but for Manet the whole picture was only a technical experiment: the nude woman in front was only there because the painter wanted to observe the play of the sun and the reflections of the foliage upon naked flesh; the woman in her chemise merely owed her existence to the circumstance of her charming outline making such a delightful patch of white amid the green meadows. Manet for the first time touched the problem which Madox Brown had thrown out in his “Work” ten years before in England, though for the present he did so with no greater success: the sunbeams glanced no doubt, but they were heavy and opaque; the sky was bright, but without atmosphere. As yet there is nothing of the Manet who belongs to history.

Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MANET.   THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE “KEARSARGE” AND “ALABAMA.”

The celebrated “Olympia” of 1865, now to be found in the Luxembourg, was painted during this stage in his development: it represents a neurotic, anæmic creature, who stretches out, pale and sickly, her meagre nudity upon white linen, with a purring cat at her feet; whilst a negress in a red dress draws back the curtain, offering her a bouquet. With this picture—no one can tell why—the definite battles over Impressionism began. The critics who talked about obscenity were not consistent, because Titian’s pictures of Venus with her female attendant, the little dog, and the youth sitting upon the edge of the bed, are not usually held to be obscene. But it is nevertheless difficult to find in this flatly modelled body, with its hard black outlines, those artistic qualities which Zola discovered in it. The picture has nothing whatever of Titian in it, but it may almost be said to have something of Cranach. “The Picnic” and “Olympia” have both only an historical interest as the first works in which the artist trusted his own eyes, refusing to look through any one’s spectacles. Feeling that he would come to nothing if he continued to study nature through the medium of an old master, he had to render some real thing just as it appeared to him when he was not looking into the mirror of old pictures. He tried to forget what he had studied in galleries, the tricks of art which he had learnt with Couture, and the famous pictures he had seen. In his earlier works there had been a far-fetched refinement and a delicacy taken from the old masters, but “The Picnic” and “Olympia” are simpler and more independent. In both he was already an “Impressionist,” true to his personal vision, though he could not entirely express the new language that hovered upon his lips. He had tried both to rid himself of Courbet’s brown sauce and of the ivory tone of Bouguereau, and to be just to local tones through simple and independent observation; in his “Picnic” he had painted the trees green, the earth yellow, and the sky grey, and in “Olympia” the bed white and the body of the woman flesh-colour. But he was as little successful as the pre-Raphaelites in bringing the local tones into full harmony. This is the step which Manet made in advance of the pre-Raphaelites: after he had emancipated himself from the conventional brown and ivory scheme of tone, and had been for a time, like the pre-Raphaelites, true although hard, he attained that harmony which hitherto had been either not reached by artistic means or not reached at all, by strict observation of the medium by which nature produces her harmonies—light. As the air, the pervasive atmosphere, renders nature everywhere harmonious and refined in colour, so it forthwith became for the artist the means of reaching that great harmony which is the object of all pictorial endeavour, and which had never previously been reached except through some mannerism.

Baschet.
MANET.BOATING.
Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
MANET.A BAR AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRES.

This movement, so historically memorable, when Manet discovered the sun and the fine fluid of the atmosphere, was shortly before 1870. Not long before the declaration of war he was in the country, in the neighbourhood of Paris, staying with his friend de Nittis; but he continued to work as though he were at home, only his studio was here the pleasure-ground. Here one day he sat in full sunlight, placed his model amid the flowers of the turf, and began to paint. The result was “The Garden,” now in the possession of Madame de Nittis. The young wife of the Italian painter is reclining in an easy-chair, between her husband, who is lying on the grass, and her child asleep in its cradle. Every flower is fresh and bright upon the fragrant sward. The green of the stretch of grass is luminous, and everything is bathed in soft, bright atmosphere; the leaves cast their blue shadows upon the yellow gravel path. “Plein-air” made its entry into painting.

In 1870 his activity had to be interrupted. He entered a company of Volunteers consisting chiefly of artists and men of letters, and in December he became a lieutenant in the Garde Nationale, where he had Meissonier as his colonel. The pictures, therefore, in which he was entirely Manet belong exclusively to the period following 1870.

From this time his great problem was the sun, the glow of daylight, the tremor of the air upon the earth basking in light. He became a natural philosopher who could never satisfy himself, studying the effect of light and determining with the observation of a man of science how the atmosphere alters the phenomena of colour.

Baschet.
MANET.   SPRING: JEANNE.

In tender, virginal, light grey tones, never seen before, he depicted, in fourteen pictures exhibited at a dealer’s, the luxury and grace of Paris, the bright days of summer and soirées flooded with gaslight, the faded features of the fallen maiden and the refined chic of the woman of the world. There was to be seen “Nana,” that marvel of audacious grace. Laced in a blue silk corset, and otherwise clad merely in a muslin smock with her feet in pearl-grey stockings, the blond woman stands at the mirror painting her lips, and carelessly replying to the words of a man who is watching her upon the sofa behind. Near it hung balcony scenes, fleeting sketches from the skating rink, the café concert, the Bal de l’Opéra, the déjeuner scene at Père Lathuille’s, and the “Bar at the Folies-Bergères.” In one case he has made daylight the subject of searching study, in another the artificial illumination of the footlights. “Music in the Tuileries” reveals a crowd of people swarming in an open, sunny place. Every figure was introduced as a patch of colour, but these patches were alive and this multitude spoke. One of the best pictures was “Boating”—a craft boldly cut away in its frame, after the manner of the Japanese, and seated in it a young lady in light blue and a young man in white, their figures contrasting finely with the delicate grey of the water and the atmosphere impregnated with moisture. And scattered amongst these pictures there were to be found powerful sea-pieces and charming, piquant portraits.