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.