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Updated: May 2, 2025
What I reproach Millet with is that it is always the same thing, the same peasant, the same sabot, the same sentiment. You must admit that it is somewhat stereotyped. What does that matter; what is more stereotyped than Japanese art? But that does not prevent it from being always beautiful. People talk of Manet's originality; that is just what I can't see.
Such pictures symbolize for us the quintessence and highest level of definite types of life. Manet's "Olympia" and Goya's "Maja" belong here equally with Leonardo's "Christ" or "Mona Lisa," with Raphael's Madonnas and Michelangelo's gods and angels. In them is attained the most intense concentration of psychic life possible.
"Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said: 'I look forward to the day when Manet's picture will hang in the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison. It'll be there. Every day I see the time grow nearer.
Why does not Liverpool or Manchester buy one of these masterpieces? If the blueness of the blouse frightens the administrators of these galleries, I will ask them and perhaps this would be the more practical project to consider the purchase of Manet's first and last historical picture, the death of the unfortunate Maximilian in Mexico.
Authority for the broken brushwork of Monet is to be found in Manet's last pictures, and I remember Manet's reply when I questioned him about the pure violet shadows which, just before his death, he was beginning to introduce into his pictures. "One year one paints violet and people scream, and the following year every one paints a great deal more violet."
Hals would have taken his hat off to it. Twenty years ago Manet's name was a folly and a byword in the Parisian studios.
It was in 1863 that the storm of popular fury burst over Manet's head, on the exhibition of his first important picture, painted three years before, generally known as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. This wonderful canvas was something so new and so surprising that it was rejected by the jury of the Salon.
Indeed one is tempted often to inquire of the latter, Why so much interest in what apparently seems to you of so little import? Are we never to have your skill, your observation, your amassing of "documents" turned to any account? Where is the realistic tragedy, comedy, epic, composition of any sort? Courbet's "Cantonniers," Manet's "Bar," or Bastien-Lepage's "Joan of Arc," perhaps.
In 1881 the portrait of Rochefort and that of the lion-killer, Pertuiset, procured the artist a medal at the Salon, and Antonin Proust, the friend of Manet's childhood, who had become Minister of Fine Arts, honoured himself in decorating him with the legion of honour.
Whoever beholds a work of Manet's, even without knowing the conditions of his life, will feel that there is something great, the lion's claw which Delacroix had recognised as far back as 1861, and to which, it is said, even the great Ingres had paid homage on the jury which examined with disgust the Guitarero.
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