{"id":1492,"date":"2026-05-20T22:10:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T20:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/edouard-manet-from-the-luncheon-scandal-to-his-last-painting\/"},"modified":"2026-08-24T22:43:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T20:43:40","slug":"edouard-manet-from-the-luncheon-scandal-to-his-last-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horscadre.paris\/en\/edouard-manet-from-the-luncheon-scandal-to-his-last-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00c9douard Manet \u2014 From the *Luncheon* Scandal to His Last Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Paris, May 1863, Salon des Refus\u00e9s.<\/strong> 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\u2014unashamed, 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, \u00c9douard Manet<\/strong>, thirty-one years old, the son of a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Justice, has justinvented modern painting<\/strong>. He doesn\u2019t know it yet. He only thinks that he has just been rejected by the official Salon<\/strong> for the second time in a row. <\/p>\n\n

Twenty years later, upon his death in April 1883, he would be described as \u201cthe first of the moderns.\u201d<\/strong> Picasso would paint tributes to *Luncheon on the Grass*<\/em> in 1960\u20131961. Matisse would speak of Manet as the painter who made everything possible. The Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay would devote entire galleries to his work. <\/p>\n\n

But between 1863 and 1883, Manet weathered two decades of successive scandals<\/strong>, never ceasing in his quest for the official recognition he would receive only at the very end of his life\u2014the Legion of Honor, on December 31, 1881, at the age of forty-nine, two years before his death.<\/p>\n\n

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 Vel\u00e1zquez at the Louvre while painting courtesans with direct gazes. The man and his work, united in the same fruitful contradiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

The Child of the Parisian Middle Class<\/h2>\n\n

\u00c9douard Manet was born on January 23, 1832<\/strong>, 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<\/strong>. His father, Auguste Manet<\/strong> (1797\u20131862), was a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Justice<\/strong>, a judge at the Seine Court, and later a bureau chief. His mother, Eug\u00e9nie-D\u00e9sir\u00e9e Fournier<\/strong> (1811\u20131885), daughter of the chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was the goddaughter of Prince Bernadotte<\/strong> \u2014the future King of Sweden, Charles XIV Jean. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9douard was the eldest of three sons. His younger brother, Eug\u00e8ne Manet<\/strong> (1833\u20131892)\u2014who would marry Berthe Morisot<\/strong> in 1874\u2014remained by his side throughout his life. The youngest, Gustave Manet<\/strong> (1835\u20131884), became a lawyer and later a radical politician. <\/p>\n\n

At Rollin Middle School<\/strong> (now Jacques-Decour High School, on Rue de Trudaine in the 9th arrondissement), the boy was distracted<\/strong>. He filled his notebooks with caricatures, wrote little, and read even less. His father wanted him to study law. \u00c9douard flatly refused. The family negotiated a compromise:the Naval Academy<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n

\u00c9douard took the entrance exam in 1848<\/strong>. He failed. To gain experience at sea before his second attempt, he set sail in December 1848\u2014at the age of sixteen\u2014aboard the *Le Havre et Guadeloupe*<\/em>, a training ship that took him to Rio de Janeiro<\/strong>. The voyage lasted six months. In Brazil, \u00c9douard made numerous sketches. It was probably also during this voyage that he contracted syphilis<\/strong>, which would kill him thirty-five years later. <\/p>\n\n

Return to Paris in June 1849. Second entrance exam for the Naval Academy. Another failure.<\/strong> Auguste Manet finally agreed to let his son pursue a career in painting. In 1850<\/strong>, at the age of eighteen, \u00c9douard joined the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture<\/strong> (1815\u20131879), who was then at the height of his fame following the triumph of his painting *The Romans in Decline*<\/em> at the 1847 Salon. <\/p>\n\n

The Louvre as a School \u2014 Vel\u00e1zquez, Goya, Titian<\/h2>\n\n

Manet spent six years<\/strong> in Thomas Couture\u2019s studio, from 1850 to 1856. Six years of frequent clashes<\/strong> 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 \u201cas one tosses aside a hat\u201d<\/em> \u2014a phrase that sums up the free, almost brutal brushwork that Manet was in the process of inventing. <\/p>\n\n

Alongside his work in the studio, Manet spent his days at the Louvre<\/strong>. There, he tirelessly copied the old masters<\/strong>: <\/p>\n\n