Manet, Edouard

French painter. One of the foremost French artists of the 19th century, he is often regarded as the father of modern painting. Rebelling against the academic tradition, he developed a clear and unaffected realist style that was one of the founding forces of Impressionism. His subjects were mainly contemporary, such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882; Courtauld Art Gallery, London).

Manet received a very traditional academic art education under a history painter; his real influences were Goya, Velázquez and Courbet. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe/Picnic on the Grass 1863 and Olympia 1865 (both Musée d'Orsay, Paris), though both based on Renaissance masterpieces, offended conservative tastes in their matter-of-fact treatment of the nude body.

Though he never exhibited with the Impressionists – he had a classical sense of order and composition – many of them were were strongly influenced by his pioneering works, and he in turn,from the early 1870s, was influenced by figures such as Berthe Morisot, his works becoming lighter in both touch and colour.