First Impressionists
Ross King looks at Édouard Manet and the birth of an art movement
Quentin Mills-Fenn

A hundred forty years ago, the most famous painter in the world was Ernest Meissonier. His canvasses sold for enormous sums, he had a fabulous palace in the French countryside, and critics and collectors praised his name.

Édouard Manet was also a painter working in the same period. He was considered an also-ran, if you will.

Nowadays, the painters’ reputations are reversed. Manet’s canvasses, such as Olympia and Dejeuner sur l’herbe, are the centrepieces of museum collections, and he’s the subject of stacks of art-history books. Reproductions of his works can be found on coffee mugs, umbrellas and mouse pads.

As for Meissonier... well, have you heard of him?

Art historian Ross King explains how all this came about in his new book, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (Bond Street Books.)

In his book, King describes what French society was like at the time, including factors that contributed to Meissonier’s astonishing fame.

“People had simple expectations from art in the 19th century,” King says. “They wanted a story, and he would give them a vignette. The most obvious example is his battle paintings. People could see Napoleon. Meissonier gave them that.
“The other thing was his technical facility. Collectors would have a Meissonier on their laps and look at it with a magnifying glass.

“He coloured everything and didn’t go outside the lines.”

Manet was a different matter entirely. Painterly technique was never his strong point. He also didn’t have much interest in battle scenes. Instead, he painted scenes of everyday life with fluid — even loose — brush strokes. People used to the carefully wrought canvasses didn’t know what to make of Manet’s offerings.

“Manet couldn’t be dismissed that easily,” King says. “He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts (the country’s most prestigious art school).”

Art held a prominent place in France at the time. The Paris Salon, a government-sponsored art exhibition, was held in Paris every year, and it’s astonishing to read how popular it was. King writes that in some years as many as a million people visited the Salon during its six-week run, meaning crowds averaged more than 23,000 people a day.

King also takes care to put the lie to the popular conception that the Impressionist painters, those who followed Manet, were ignored by the public. Though never reaching Meissonier’s sales, Claude Monet and his friends had their fans.

“The story that nobody liked them isn’t entirely true,” King says. “There was certainly official resistance, but after the initial shock people accepted Monet. His landscapes were popular. Manet was quite popular in the 1880s.”

Finally, King points out that Manet really shouldn’t be grouped with Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and the rest. Manet certainly kept his distance.

“There are big differences in his work and the others,” says. “He’s not properly an Impressionist. He thought Cezanne was rude and didn’t like his art, which didn’t bode well for Cezanne.

“Manet liked Renoir, thought he was a good fellow but that he couldn’t paint. (Manet) thought it looked like (Renoir) painted with cotton swabs.”