Édouard Manet — From the *Luncheon* Scandal to His Last Painting

Paris, May 1863, Salon des Refusés. A crowd gathers in front of a large painting. A young nude woman sits on the grass between two men in contemporary suits. She looks directly at the viewer—unashamed, uninhibited, and without any mythological justification. The scandal is immediate. People laugh. They hurl insults. They cry out that it is a provocation. The painter, Édouard Manet, thirty-one years old, the son of a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Justice, has justinvented modern painting. He doesn’t know it yet. He only thinks that he has just been rejected by the official Salon for the second time in a row.

Twenty years later, upon his death in April 1883, he would be described as “the first of the moderns.” Picasso would paint tributes to *Luncheon on the Grass* in 1960–1961. Matisse would speak of Manet as the painter who made everything possible. The Musée d’Orsay would devote entire galleries to his work.

But between 1863 and 1883, Manet weathered two decades of successive scandals, never ceasing in his quest for the official recognition he would receive only at the very end of his life—the Legion of Honor, on December 31, 1881, at the age of forty-nine, two years before his death.

This article tells the story of a man who wanted to be accepted by the Salon and who invented modernism, who refused to exhibit his work alongside the Impressionists even though they regarded him as their master, and who copied Velázquez at the Louvre while painting courtesans with direct gazes. The man and his work, united in the same fruitful contradiction.

The Child of the Parisian Middle Class

Édouard Manet was born on January 23, 1832, in Paris, in a townhouse on Rue Bonaparte in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. His family belonged to the Parisian upper middle class. His father, Auguste Manet (1797–1862), was a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Justice, a judge at the Seine Court, and later a bureau chief. His mother, Eugénie-Désirée Fournier (1811–1885), daughter of the chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was the goddaughter of Prince Bernadotte —the future King of Sweden, Charles XIV Jean.

Édouard was the eldest of three sons. His younger brother, Eugène Manet (1833–1892)—who would marry Berthe Morisot in 1874—remained by his side throughout his life. The youngest, Gustave Manet (1835–1884), became a lawyer and later a radical politician.

At Rollin Middle School (now Jacques-Decour High School, on Rue de Trudaine in the 9th arrondissement), the boy was distracted. He filled his notebooks with caricatures, wrote little, and read even less. His father wanted him to study law. Édouard flatly refused. The family negotiated a compromise:the Naval Academy.

Édouard took the entrance exam in 1848. He failed. To gain experience at sea before his second attempt, he set sail in December 1848—at the age of sixteen—aboard the *Le Havre et Guadeloupe*, a training ship that took him to Rio de Janeiro. The voyage lasted six months. In Brazil, Édouard made numerous sketches. It was probably also during this voyage that he contracted syphilis, which would kill him thirty-five years later.

Return to Paris in June 1849. Second entrance exam for the Naval Academy. Another failure. Auguste Manet finally agreed to let his son pursue a career in painting. In 1850, at the age of eighteen, Édouard joined the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture (1815–1879), who was then at the height of his fame following the triumph of his painting *The Romans in Decline* at the 1847 Salon.

The Louvre as a School — Velázquez, Goya, Titian

Manet spent six years in Thomas Couture’s studio, from 1850 to 1856. Six years of frequent clashes between the academic master and the student, who rejected conventional classical subjects, preferred to copy live models as they were, and was irritated by the conventions of idealization. Couture would criticize him for painting “as one tosses aside a hat” —a phrase that sums up the free, almost brutal brushwork that Manet was in the process of inventing.

Alongside his work in the studio, Manet spent his days at the Louvre. There, he tirelessly copied the old masters:

• Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), a Spanish painter of the Golden Age, known for his deep blacks, his uniform backgrounds, and his painting style that made no concessions to idealization
• Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) — Manet rediscovered Goya during his trip to Spain in 1865 — for the freedom of his contemporary subject matter and the boldness of his approach
• Titian (c. 1488–1576) — *Venus of Urbino* (1538) served as the direct inspiration for*Olympia*

This training under the masters was central. Manet did not reject the pictorial tradition—he broke away from it from within. He transposes the conventions of the great masters into the modern Paris of 1863. It is this shift that will cause a scandal: not the subject matter (nude Venuses have always been shown at the Salon), but the change of setting, which transforms the canon into a provocation.

In 1856, Manet left the Couture studio for good and traveled throughout Europe: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and Italy (Florence and Venice). There, he saw in person the works of which he had previously known only reproductions. His path was set.

1859–1862 — The First Steps, the First Rejections

Manet presented his first painting at the 1859 Salon: *The Absinthe Drinker*. It was rejected by the jury, despite Eugène Delacroix ’s intervention on his behalf. This was his first rejection. He was twenty-seven years old.

In 1861, he returned to the Salon with two paintings. Both were accepted. *The Spanish Singer*, a tribute to Velázquez, received an honorable mention. It was his first real success. Théophile Gautier wrote about it in the press. Baudelaire took note.

The following year, 1862, Manet painted several seminal works. *Music in the Tuileries* is a social scene treated as a manifesto: it features Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Henri Fantin-Latour, Jacques Offenbach, and the painter’s brother, Eugène Manet. It is a portrait of Parisian high society, with Manet—a well-groomed bourgeois who was always elegantly dressed—at its center.

It was also in 1862 that Manet met Victorine Meurent (1844–1927), an eighteen-year-old model in Thomas Couture’s studio. She would become his primary model for eleven years (1862–1873)—but also his friend, and later, his rival at the 1876 Salon, where she exhibited her own painting. She appears in nearly all of the major works of the 1860s: *The Street Singer* (1862), *Mademoiselle V. in an Espada Costume* (1862), *Luncheon on the Grass* (1863), *Olympia* (1863), and *The Railroad* (1872–1873).

May 1863 — The Scandal of the Salon des Refusés

At the 1863 Official Salon, the jury rejected the three paintings Manet had submitted, including *Le Bain* —which would become *Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe*. The jury also rejected more than 3,000 works that year, out of the 5,000 submitted. Faced with widespread discontent among the Parisian art world, Napoleon III intervened personally. On April 24, 1863, he decreed the opening of a parallel Salon reserved for the rejected works: the Salon des Refusés.

The Salon des Refusés opened on May 15, 1863, at the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-Élysées, in twelve rooms adjacent to the official Salon. Approximately 1,200 works were exhibited there. Manet presented three paintings, including *Le Bain*. It caused an immediate scandal.

Manet’s painting challenges three conventions at once:

First, female nudity without any mythological justification: the young woman in *The Luncheon* is neither Venus, nor a nymph, nor an allegory—she is a contemporary Parisian woman (the recognizable Victorine Meurent), naked among men dressed as people dressed in 1863.

Next, the blend of the contemporary and the classical: Manet claimed the legacy of Titian (The Country Concert in the Louvre, then attributed to Giorgione) and Raphael (The Judgment of Paris, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi). But he transposes these compositions to Paris in 1863, transforming the allegory into a scene that was considered obscene in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Finally, the modern style: a light color palette, minimal modeling, flat shadows, flattened perspective, and painting “as casually as one tosses a hat,” to quote Couture. The technique itself is seen as a provocation.

Manet would later write, with a mixture of amusement and bitterness, that he called his painting “the square piece”. The Parisian press, however, was not amused. *Le Petit Journal*, *L’Illustration*, and *La Gazette des Beaux-Arts* launched a barrage of attacks. Manet was classified among the “unsavory” painters .

It was also in 1863, on October 28, following the death of his father Auguste in September, that Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff (1829–1906), a Dutch pianist whom he had been seeing since 1849—which, as we shall see, raises the question of Léon.

The Question by Léon Leenhoff

Suzanne Leenhoff gave birth to Léon-Édouard Koëlla-Leenhoff on January 29, 1852, in Paris. Édouard Manet was twenty at the time, and Suzanne was twenty-two. The name Koëlla listed in the birth registry does not correspond to any known man—it was likely a name invented for the occasion. The Manets and the Leenhoffs would always officially refer to Léon as “Suzanne’s younger brother, ” sometimes as “Édouard’s godson,” but never as the legitimate child of either of them. Édouard Manet would not acknowledge the child. But Léon grew up in the Manet household and appeared in several of Édouard’s paintings, including *Reading* (c. 1865) and *Lunch in the Studio* (1868).

Three theories regarding Léon’s paternity coexist in historical literature. First hypothesis, the most widespread: Édouard is the father, and his late marriage to Suzanne in 1863 (eleven years after the child’s birth) regularized a situation that would have scandalized Parisian high society during Auguste Manet’s lifetime. Second hypothesis: Auguste Manet himself was the father—Suzanne was initially his mistress, and Édouard married the mother to protect the family’s reputation after the father’s death in 1862. Third hypothesis: an unidentified third man, perhaps someone close to the Leenhoff family in the Netherlands.

Most contemporary biographers (Henri Loyrette, Françoise Cachin, Adolphe Tabarant) lean toward the first hypothesis (Édouard Sr.). But Manet’s absolute silence on this matter—he never publicly acknowledged Léon as his son, not even later in life—remains a biographical mystery. This discretion, in an era when bourgeois respectability was an obsession, speaks volumes about the constant tension within Manet between the bohemian circles he frequented and the bourgeoisie, of which he remained, in every way, the representative.

May 1865 — The Olympia Scandal

Manet painted *Olympia* in 1863, the same year as *Luncheon on the Grass*. But he kept the painting in his studio for two years, aware that it would provoke an even more violent reaction than *Luncheon on the Grass*. He finally exhibited it at the official Salon in 1865.

The scandal is even more intense than the one in 1863. And it is not the nudity itself that is shocking—at the 1865 Salon, dozens of nude Venuses were exhibited without the slightest protest. What is shocking is how the nudity is depicted.

Olympia is a young, naked woman lying on a bed. But she is not Venus. She is a contemporary Parisian prostitute. In the 19th century, the name “Olympia” referred to a specific category of courtesans. The black ribbon around her neck, the gold bracelet, the discarded oriental slippers, the bouquet brought by a Black servant girl (probably announcing a client)—all the hallmarks of high-end Parisian prostitution are there, perfectly clear to contemporaries.

Above all, Olympia looks directly at the viewer. No modesty, no idealization, no conventional reserve. The direct gaze of a modern, clear-eyed woman who knows what she’s doing and stands by it. At her feet lies a black cat with its tail erect—an obvious sexual symbol at the time, replacing the traditional faithful dog found in depictions of reclining Venuses.

The Parisian press went wild. Paul de Saint-Victor wrote a sentence in *La Presse* on May 28, 1865, that would go down in history:

“The crowd is thronging in front of Mr. Manet’s decaying Olympia, as if at a morgue. Art that has sunk so low does not deserve to be criticized.”

— Paul de Saint-Victor, *La Presse*, May 28, 1865*

The image is harrowing. The Paris morgue, located on Quai du Marché-Neuf on the Île de la Cité, used to display unidentified bodies behind a glass case so that the public could identify them. Saint-Victor compares Manet’s painting to a body on display.

Manet, deeply hurt, wrote to Charles Baudelaire to express his distress. But the following year, in May 1866, a twenty-six-year-old writer named Émile Zola publicly defended the painter in *L’Évènement*:

“When our artists give us Venuses, they distort nature; they lie. Édouard Manet wondered why lie—why not tell the truth?”

— Émile Zola, “A New Style in Painting: Édouard Manet,” L’Évènement*, May 7, 1866*

This marked the beginning of a twenty-year friendship. Zola would use Manet as the model for the painter Claude Lantier in *L’Œuvre* (1886, published three years after Manet’s death). Manet, for his part, painted the famous Portrait of Émile Zola in 1868, which is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

The Man Who Rejects the Impressionists

This is the central paradox of Manet’s life. Although Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, and Edgar Degas regarded him as their spiritual mentor —and although the entire young generation of French painters from the 1860s to the 1880s saw him as the founder of modernity — Manet systematically refused to participate in their exhibitions.

He refused to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874 at Nadar’s studio. He refused to participate in the second one in 1876. He refused to participate in the third one in 1877. And he would refuse all subsequent ones (1879, 1880, 1881, 1882, 1886). Of the eight official Impressionist exhibitions, Manet did not participate in any.

Why? Manet wanted the official Salon—not an alternative exhibition. He believed his battle had to be fought within the very temple of convention itself —not on the fringes. He told Antonin Proust, his childhood friend who had become Minister of Fine Arts: “I will never be part of a group. It is at the Salon that the fight must be waged.”

This distinction is key to understanding Manet. He was an institutional revolutionary —not a secessionist. He wanted to reform the Salon, not destroy it. For this reason, he would always remain, until his death, at a distance from his own Impressionist followers—whom he admired without wanting to be part of their movement.

The 1870s — Argenteuil, Berthe Morisot, and Her Belated Recognition

During the summers of 1874 and 1875, Manet worked in Argenteuil and Gennevilliers with Claude Monet. This was the only period during which he painted outdoors, from life, in the Impressionist style. His palette became lighter, and his shadows dissolved into the light. He painted Argenteuil (1874), On a Boat (1874), Claude Monet in His Floating Studio (1874).

This influence was mutual. Manet learned from the Impressionists how to paint outdoors; the Impressionists learned from Manet the importance of solid composition, respect for drawing, and the dignity of the contemporary subject.

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), a painter in her own right, posed for Manet beginning in 1868. *The Balcony* (1868–1869, Musée d’Orsay) depicts Berthe in the foreground, gazing intently. This was followed by *Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets* (1872, Musée d’Orsay), *Berthe Morisot with a Fan* (1874, Lille Museum of Fine Arts), Berthe Morisot Reclining (1873, private collection). Eleven portraits in all. On December 22, 1874, Berthe married Eugène Manet, Édouard’s younger brother, thus becoming the painter’s sister-in-law.

The official recognition that Manet had been awaiting for twenty years finally arrived. On December 31, 1881, at the recommendation of his childhood friend Antonin Proust —who had become Minister of Fine Arts in the Gambetta administration—Manet was named a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

He is forty-nine years old. The syphilis he likely contracted in Brazil in 1849 is entering its tertiary stage. He has two years left to live.

1880–1883 — Illness, Amputation, Death

Beginning in 1880, Manet’s health deteriorated rapidly. Tertiary syphilis caused locomotor ataxia —a progressive paralysis of the lower limbs accompanied by excruciating pain. Manet could no longer walk without great difficulty. He traveled by carriage between his studio on Rue d’Amsterdam and his home on Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg.

Despite his illness, he painted incessantly. First, still lifes —bunches of asparagus, bouquets, fruit—small, intimate works that he could create from an armchair. Then pastels —a technique less physically demanding than oil painting. And finally, in 1881–1882, his last masterpiece: A Bar at the Folies Bergère (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). A waitress with a distant gaze faces the viewer; behind her, a large mirror reflects the crowded cabaret. A testament to his art. Manet painted this canvas from an armchair, with an assistant posing while he watched from his wheelchair.

In early April 1883, Manet’s left leg was infected with gangrene. The doctors decided to amputate it in an attempt to save his life. The operation took place on April 20, 1883. Manet was fifty-one years old.

He survived only ten days. He died on April 30, 1883, from generalized gangrene. His friends were at his bedside: Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile Zola, and Antonin Proust. He was buried on May 3, 1883, at the Passy Cemetery (16th arrondissement of Paris), where his grave can still be seen today.

The Legacy — The First of the Moderns

The following year, in January 1884, Antonin Proust organized a posthumous exhibition at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. A total of 116 works were on display. Émile Zola wrote the preface to the catalog. Manet was celebrated unreservedly for the first time by the very institution that had persecuted him for twenty years.

Manet’s influence on modern painting as a whole is immediate and lasting.

On Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley all explicitly cite him as an influence. Without Manet, there would be no Impressionism.

On Fauvism (1905–1907): Henri Matisse and André Derain saw in Manet’s flat areas of color the theoretical justification for their own chromatic revolution.

On Cubism: Between March 1959 and August 1962, Pablo Picasso painted a series of twenty-seven variations on Manet’s *Luncheon on the Grass *. It is the most systematic tribute a great 20th-century painter has ever paid to a great 19th-century painter.

The phrase that will come to be accepted is“the first of the moderns.” Not the last of the classics. Not the first of the Impressionists (a title that belongs to Pissarro). The first of the moderns —the one who ushered all of Western painting into a new era, without himself fully realizing its significance, without ever wanting to be anything other than a painter of the official Salon whom people would have recognized.

The institutional culmination of this legacy can now be seen at the Musée d’Orsay, where *Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe* and *Olympia* are on display just a few meters apart in the Impressionist gallery. Two scandals that have become two national treasures.

How to View His Works

Manet’s major collections are located in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris — a leading French art collection. It houses, among other works, *Luncheon on the Grass* (1863), *Olympia* (1863), *The Fife Player* (1866), The Balcony (1868–1869), The Portrait of Émile Zola (1868), Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872) and several other major works.

Courtauld Institute of Art, London — houses A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882), Manet’s last major work.

National Gallery of Art, Washington — extensive collection of Manet works, including The Old Musician (1862) and several portraits.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — several major works, including seascapes and still lifes.
Folkwang Museum, Essen (Germany) — houses *The Suicide* (c. 1881) and other late works.

Further Reading

Institutional sources cited in this article

• Musée d’Orsay, official exhibition notes for Luncheon on the Grass and *Olympia*.
• Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein, *Edouard Manet: A Catalogue Raisonné*, 2 volumes, Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne/Paris, 1975. The definitive catalogue raisonné (430 paintings, 88 pastels, 677 drawings).
• Adolphe Tabarant, *Manet and His Works*, Gallimard, Paris, 1947. A standard biography.
• Manet: 1832–1883, exhibition catalog for the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (April 22–August 1, 1983) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 10–November 27, 1983), Réunion des musées nationaux, 1983. A definitive retrospective.

Primary sources cited

• Paul de Saint-Victor, *La Presse*, May 28, 1865 — review of*Olympia*.
• Émile Zola, “A New Style in Painting: Édouard Manet,” *L’Évènement*, May 7, 1866 — in defense of Manet.

Leading Modern Studies

• Isolde Pludermacher, Édouard Manet, *Luncheon on the Grass*, BnF Éditions / Musée d’Orsay, 2025.
• Isolde Pludermacher, Edouard Manet, Women, Rouen, Éditions des Falaises, 2015.
• Theodore Reff, *Manet: Olympia*, The Penguin Press, New York and London, 1976.
• George Mauner, *Manet, Painter-Philosopher*, University Park (Pa.) and London, 1975.

Institutional Documentation

• Musée d’Orsay, Paris — the main French collection.
• Courtauld Institute of Art, London — A bar at the Folies Bergère.

See also on Hors Cadre

• Claude Monet—the painter who gave his name to Impressionism —the friend with whom Manet spent the summers of 1874–1875 in Argenteuil.
• Camille Pissarro—the unassuming master who trained an entire generation —the only painter in the Impressionist group to have participated in all eight of the movement’s exhibitions, in stark contrast to Manet, who did not participate in any of them.
• Paul Gauguin—his work admired, the man controversial —the next generation, trained by Pissarro, which carried forward the modernism pioneered by Manet.

— M