Manet Breaks the Fourth Wall

After the 1865 Salon, Édouard Manet befriends a young group of painters with wild ideas, and finds himself again at the center of controversy.

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Olympia, Édouard Manet ca. 1863. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A woman reclines on a daybed—completely naked, save for a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, a slipper dangling off her left foot, and a flower in her hair. An African woman, fully-clothed, presents her with an embroidered fabric. From the shadows, a black cat watches the scene unfold.

The naked woman stares at us. She is thin, and we know from looking at her that she is not luxuriously fed. But she’s not starving, either.

The patrons of the 1865 Salon would have known exactly what they were looking at.

Prostitution was big business in Paris, and some of the Salon’s male attendees were intimately familiar with the scene depicted in Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). Unlike his equally-shocking Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, he actually managed to get this painting into the Salon. (The models for Olympia are the French artist Victorine-Louise Meurent, who also modeled for Le Déjeuner, and a Black art model named Laure, whom we unfortunately know very little about.)

Why in God’s name would the Salon display such a controversial painting? Like Le Déjeuner, Olympia takes inspiration from the Old Master Titian. Given the work’s obvious parallels to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), it’s possible that the jury felt this work could just barely pass. Manet’s other painting shown that year was Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers (1865), one of his last history paintings. In this case, the subject matter was in keeping with the Salon’s usual standards, though painted in his signature, vivid color scheme.

Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, Édouard Manet ca. 1865. Via the Art Institute of Chicago.

Both works were brutally criticized, particularly (and unsurprisingly) Olympia. “The crowd, as at the morgue, throngs in front of the gamy Olympia and the horrible Ecce Homo of M. Manet,” wrote Paul de Saint-Victor in La Presse. Louis Leroy, the critic for Le Charivari who would coin the term “Impressionist” in 1874, wrote, “If I ever write a single line in praise of Olympia, I authorize you to exhibit me some place with that bit of my article tied around my neck, and I would have amply deserved it.”¹