How Manet Became an Artist

In the first essay of the series "The Life of Édouard Manet," we learn how Manet finally embraced his passion for painting.

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Self-Portrait with Palette, Édouard Manet ca. 1878-1879. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Once again, Édouard had failed the entrance exam. He would not become a naval officer.

Auguste Manet didn’t know what to do with his eldest son. He thought his plan was sensible: Édouard should study law at the University of Paris, as he had years before, and his own father had done before him. Alas, Édouard was not academically-inclined. He cared little for school—he even had to repeat the fifth grade.¹

Auguste landed on another idea: the navy. Becoming a military officer was a respectable choice for an upper-class man, and with this in mind, Auguste sent Édouard on a training vessel to Brazil when the boy was sixteen. Two years later, what did he have to show for it?

Much to Auguste’s dismay, there was only one thing that his son wished to do.

Édouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832. His parents were among the landed gentry—wealthy families who had owned country estates for generations, though they technically didn’t hold aristocratic titles. There existed a set of professions that were permissible for men of this class to pursue: the military, civil service, politics.

Auguste himself was a judge and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. He kept his moderate republican beliefs to himself, for to take a public stance against monarchy would cost him his career in the Ministry of Justice. Otherwise, he dressed soberly, behaved properly, and managed the family investments. He also married the right kind of woman: Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, a goddaughter of the king of Sweden.

Some professions were simply beyond the pale for people like them. The fact that their son Édouard, a boy of impeccable breeding, would dream of being an artist was all too much.

Artists were bohemians. Eccentrics. Not respectable.

But Édouard had returned home, and the family reached a turning point. The boy was eighteen. He wouldn’t be a judge, and he couldn’t be a naval officer. All he wanted was to create art.

Finally, Auguste relented.

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Several weeks ago, I shared an essay in which I contrasted Rosa Bonheur’s Realist masterpiece The Horse Fair (1852-55) with Edgar Degas’s Impressionist take on the horse races. In it, I explored the two artistic movements that stood on either side of the border of modernity. Both embraced ordinary people and contemporary life as valid subject matter for artists, though the style and techniques used by each movement belonged to different worlds. No artist better represents this transition than Édouard Manet.