Works by Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet painted the Paris of his own day, its cafés, balls and railway, and held on to his blacks even after the Impressionists led him to lighter colours.

Manet trained from 1850 to 1856 under Thomas Couture, who pushed his students toward contemporary life, and on trips abroad he took Hals, Velázquez and Goya as models. In 1865 he wrote to Baudelaire that a bullfight was among the most beautiful and terrible sights there were. In the Bullfight watercolour of that year a grey bull gores a horse pinned to the red barrier, the torero leaps clear, and two men lean down to pull the trapped picador out.

The Railway of 1873 seats Victorine Meurent, his model for Olympia, on a low wall with a sleeping puppy and a book, beside a girl who looks away through the iron bars; the train is only white steam. Black stayed on his palette after Monet and Morisot had lightened it: in Masked Ball at the Opera top hats and tailcoats merge into one dark mass, while a leg in a red boot dangles over the balcony rail above. After the paintings, prints are the largest group below, among them At the Café of 1874, the Café Guerbois in fast, ragged lines printed by gillotage, then a new process.

After A Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882 he kept to small formats, and his last paintings were flowers in glass vases. In Flowers in a Crystal Vase, from about 1882, pink and white roses spill over a straight glass tumbler whose stubby feet are dabs of blue and white against grey.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art.