Salvador Dali

Biography

Edouard Manet born in Paris, 1832 showed early artistic talent. His father a government official, Edouard was destined for the Navy until he failed the entrance examinations. From the very beginning of his career, Manet startled the public. His "Luncheon on the Grass" (1863), in which a nude woman sits besides two fully dressed men, virtually created a scandal. This scandal might seem ridiculous by today's standards, but it marks a turning point in the history of art and in its freedom of expression.

He then began to study art with Thomas Couture, whose academic teaching did not satisfy Manet. After which he began to study the works of the Venetian Renaissance masters, the Dutch seventeenth-century artists and of the Spaniard Velázquez. He studied these first in Fountainbleau, then in the Louvre, and eventually on trips abroad to Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain where, in 1865, he discovered Goya.

Manet became the elder leader of the group of artists who met at the Café Guerbois. The experiments of some of the younger members of the Impressionist School led him to further lighten his palette, although he never experimented with the effects of light, and he preferred painting in the studio to working in the open air. Unlike the Impressionists, he made considerable use of black, a black that became a living color in his works. Manet died at the age of fifty-one of a progressive forms of paralysis, after years of suffering and futile treatment.

Although his works stem from the traditional techniques of the past, in their freedom of composition, use of color, broad planes, and solid construction, they lead toward the future. He brought fresh inspiration and technique to the observation of nature and contemporary life and served both as an influence and as the stimulus for the Impressionists.