French Realist/Impressionist Painter, 1832-1883 The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copied or used as source material. His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint. He became friends with the Impressionists Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cezanne, and Camille Pissarro, through another painter, Berthe Morisot, who was a member of the group and drew him into their activities. The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honor?? Fragonard, Morisot's paintings first had been accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864 and she continued to show in the salon for ten years. Manet became the friend and colleague of Berthe Morisot in 1868. She is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practicing since she had been introduced to it by another friend of hers, Camille Corot. They had a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into his paintings. In 1874, she became his sister-in-law when she married his brother, Eugene. Self-portrait with palette, 1879Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would waste all his inheritance on this project, which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from the major critics, it also provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters, including Degas. Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, he resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions, partly because he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity, and partly because he preferred to exhibit at the Salon. Eva Gonzal??s was his only formal student. He was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Monet and Morisot. Their influence is seen in Manet's use of lighter colors, but he retained his distinctive use of black, uncharacteristic of Impressionist painting. He painted many outdoor (plein air) pieces, but always returned to what he considered the serious work of the studio. Manet enjoyed a close friendship with composer Emmanuel Chabrier, painting two portraits of him; the musician owned 14 of Manet's paintings and dedicated his Impromptu to Manet's wife. Throughout his life, although resisted by art critics, Manet could number as his champions Emile Zola, who supported him publicly in the press, Stephane Mallarme, and Charles Baudelaire, who challenged him to depict life as it was. Manet, in turn, drew or painted each of them.  Related Paintings of Edouard Manet :. | Blond Woman with Bare Breasts | Having lunch on the grassplot | olympia | Bar aux Folies-Bergere (mk40) | Peony Stem and Shears |
Related Artists:
Carl Bille
painted Shipping off the Norwegian Coast in 1889
William Page
1811-1885 William Page studied at Phillips Academy, Andover in 1828-29 (not the Andover Theological Seminary on the same campus, as is commonly asserted). A man of mercurial temperament, Page was lacking in religious belief in youth, but later became a Swedenborgian. He received his training in art from Samuel F. B. Morse (a Phillips Academy graduate) at the National Academy of Design, and in 1836 he became a National Academician. In the 1830s and 40s, Page was based in New York, achieving renown there as a portraitist. Living in Rome from 1849 to 1860, he befriended Robert and Elizabeth Browning, whose portraits he painted. He was also a friend of William Wetmore Story and of James Russell Lowell, who dedicated his first collection of poems to him in 1843. In 1873, Page became president of the National Academy of Design. His work includes a painting of Admiral David Farragut at the Battle of Mobile Bay, the Holy Family (now at the Boston Athenaeum) and The Young Merchants (now at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia), as well as countless portraits, including portraits of John Quincy Adams, James Russell Lowell and William Shakespeare, based on the Becker death mask. He also wrote A New Geometrical Method of Measuring the Human Figure (1860). He died in 1885, aged 74 on Staten Island. Although extravagantly praised as an artist from the 1830s into the 1860s, Page's reputation suffered in later life because he changed his style so frequently and, more particularly, because technical characteristics of his painting method soon caused much of his work to darken excessively.
Stephen Wilson Van Schaick
American, 1848 - 1920