Édouard Manet

The hinge between academic painting and Impressionism. Manet was older than the Impressionists and never exhibited with them, but his refusal of polished finish, his flat shadowless lighting and his insistence on painting modern Parisian life — bars, boulevards, demi-mondaines — gave the younger painters their permission slip. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) and Olympia (1865) detonated the Salon and made him simultaneously the most attacked and most copied painter in France. He died at fifty-one of complications from syphilis, just as the establishment was beginning to honor what it had spent twenty years rejecting.