Édouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832. From 1850 to 1856 he studied with the history painter Thomas Couture, and he then worked in the atelier of the animal painter Albert de Balleroy until 1859. He came to know Eugène Delacroix, Henri Fantin-Latour and Edgar Degas, and became a close friend of Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola. His subjects were taken from everyday life. He applied his colours with short brushstrokes. His flat style, with a considerable use of black, grey and beige tones, would influence modern painting. He first showed one of his paintings in the Paris Salon in 1861, and four years later his painting Olympia, with its self-confident female nude, caused a scandal there. In 1872 the gallerist Paul Durand-Ruel acquired paintings by Manet and showed them in London. Manet moved in circles that included Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. They were all dissatisfied with academic painting, but he did not yet take part in the exhibitions of the Impressionists. His works were regularly shown at the Salon, also in New York and Boston. In the 1870s he also began painting en plein air, and his palette became lighter and more radiant. Manet died in Paris in 1883.
