Edouard Manet Litho EA For Auction at 888 Auctions on August 15, 2019

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was a French Impressionist painter who had an important impact on the course of Western art. His use of frontal lighting, impasto brushstrokes, and depictions of contemporary scenes, stirred controversy in the 19th-century Parisian art world. “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds,” he once explained.

Born on January 23, 1832 in Paris, France, he grew up in a bourgeois family. Despite his father’s wishes for him to become a naval officer, Manet entered the studio of the painter Thomas Couture. Perhaps his most influential experience came while visiting Spain and the Netherlands, where he saw the works of Diego Velázquez, Francisco De Goya, and Frans Hals. In these earlier painters, Manet found a precedent for his use of abbreviated brushstrokes and simplified forms.

In 1863, his painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, was rejected from the official Salon and hung in the Salon de Refuses, where it drew scorn from both the general public and journalists. Around this time, he began frequenting the Café Guerbois, mingling and arguing with a number of young painters, including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Though he suffered criticism early on, by the late 1870s his works were lauded both by the Salon and his peers.

Prematurely, Manet died of complications from syphilis on April 30, 1883 in Paris, France.

Today, the artist’s works are in held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, among others.