Édouard Manet

The hinge between the tradition of academic European painting and the Impressionism that would succeed it — not part of either camp, but the figure both looked to. Manet came from a well-off Parisian family, trained conventionally in the studio of Thomas Couture, and spent six years copying the old masters in museums across Europe. What he learned he put to use in paintings that looked simultaneously backwards and forwards: his subjects and handling were entirely modern, but his pictorial thinking was deeply grounded in Velázquez, Hals and Goya. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) and Olympia (1865) detonated the Salon in successive years. The first — a naked woman picnicking casually with clothed men, based directly on a Raphael composition — was rejected from the official Salon and shown at the Salon des Refusés, where it caused a riot of mockery and fascination. The second — a confrontational nude modeled on Titian's Venus of Urbino, staring directly at the viewer with the composed gaze of a professional courtesan — was accepted but hung in a back room and attracted such crowds of the hostile and the outraged that it had to be moved higher to prevent visitors from attacking it. Both paintings rejected the smooth blended modelling of academic flesh and replaced it with flat, harshly lit surfaces that looked unfinished by period standards. Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists, though he was their hero and their social companion. He was also, persistently, a man who wanted mainstream recognition — he applied for the Legion of Honour repeatedly before receiving it in 1882, the year before his death. He died in 1883, at fifty-one, of complications from locomotor ataxia linked to syphilis. Zola, who had written his earliest defence, delivered a memorial address at his graveside.