Édouard Manet: 10 works

'The composition of the picture is not linked to prototypes, and Manet designed it masterfully.'

'Édouard Manet is generally remembered as a painter of modern urban life, whose major images reflect the social and psychological ambiguities of his time. This work, which stands at the beginning of Manet's career, belongs to a minor theme in his oeuvre, but one to which he returned many times throughout his life: the theme of the sea and ships.'

'This portrait's bold brushwork, stark contrasts of light and dark, and frank presentation of the sitter reflect Manet's early passion for seventeenth-century Spanish painting.'

'"One of the most beautiful, strangest, and terrible spectacles one could see is a bullfight," wrote Édouard Manet to his friend the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire in 1865. Fascinated by bullfights, Manet here chose to illustrate the violent moment of a bull goring a horse with its horn.'

'The narrow range of tones used by Manet includes the blacks and greys usually banned from the Impressionist palette. He has borrowed from the young school a fluid, light brushstroke which suggests more than it describes.'

'Edouard Manet produced several paintings of masked balls, as well as studies for them. The most polished and complete of these, in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., was one that Manet submitted to the Salon.'

'From his second-floor window, Édouard Manet captured the holiday afternoon with his most precise, staccato brushwork in a patriotic harmony of the reds, whites, and blues of the French flag that waves from the new buildings' windows.'

'Manet, however, did not care about giving his paintings a clean finish. His style, in which he dared to leave brushstrokes visible and areas of the canvas unpainted, influenced both the Impressionists and Vincent van Gogh.'

'The delightful story of this painting is well known: Manet sold Charles Ephrussi A Bunch of Asparagus for eight hundred francs. But Ephrussi sent him a thousand francs, and Manet, who was a master of elegance and wit, painted this asparagus and sent it to him with a note saying: "There was one missing from your bunch".'

'While known as one of the greatest painters in 19th-century France, Édouard Manet was also one of the most innovative pastel artists of his era. Here he depicted the animal painter Julien de la Rochenoire, an old friend who had likely dropped by Manet's studio.'