Édouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832 into a wealthy bourgeois family and became the most consequential French painter of the 1860s — the artist who, more than any other, bridged the gap between the old tradition and the new. Trained under Thomas Couture and deeply influenced by Velázquez, Hals, and Japanese prints, Manet developed a style characterized by bold tonal contrasts, flattened space, and a frank, unapologetic modernity of subject matter that outraged critics and delighted the young painters who would become the Impressionists.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) provoked a scandal at the Salon des Refusés by presenting a nude woman picnicking casually with two fully dressed men — not as a classical nymph but as a recognizable Parisienne staring directly at the viewer. Olympia (1865) went further: a nude courtesan, clearly a modern sex worker rather than a mythological Venus, confronts the viewer with an expression of cool self-possession. The paintings were attacked as ugly and immoral, but they announced a new relationship between artist, subject, and audience that changed art forever.
Though Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists and always sought official Salon recognition, his influence on them was decisive. His late works, such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), show him absorbing Impressionist light and colour in turn. He died of syphilis in 1883 at fifty-one, and within a generation was recognized as the father of modern painting.