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Updated: May 2, 2025
Manet's great distinction is to have discovered that the sense of reality is achieved with a thousand-fold greater intensity by getting as near as possible to the actual, rather than resting content with the relative, value of every detail. Everyone who has painted since Manet has either followed him in this effort or has appeared jejune.
There are millionaires' residences in New York that might have been transplanted not only from the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, but from Touraine itself; while when I made my pilgrimage to Mr. Widener's, just outside Philadelphia, I found Rembrandt's "Mill," and Manet's dead bull-fighter, and a Vermeer, and a little meadow painted divinely by Corot, and El Greco's family group, and Donatello's St.
She was known as La Glue, her real name was Victorine, she had sat for Manet's picture of Olympe, but that was years ago. The face was thinner, but I recognised the red hair and the brown eyes, small eyes set closely, reminding one of des petits verres de cognac.
The admission was a shock, even at that late day when the din of the battle had passed. When in 1884 there was held at the École des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet's works, Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gérôme "brandished his little cane" with indignation. Why all the excitement in official circles?
He was scarcely conscious of the fact that he wanted to show off before Hayward, but when he took him round the galleries he poured out to him all the revolutionary opinions which himself had so recently adopted. He took him to Manet's Olympia and said dramatically: "I would give all the old masters except Velasquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer for that one picture." "Who was Vermeer?" asked Hayward.
He lifts his skull-cap, and how beautiful is the gesture; his dignity is the dignity that only goodness gives; and his goodness is a pure gift, existing independent of formula, a thing in itself, like Manet's painting. It was Degas who said, "A man whose profile no one ever saw," and the aphorism reminds us of the beautiful goodness that floats over his face, a light from Paradise.
In the Louvre where the Salon Carré is little changed Manet's Olympe, with her every-day seductiveness, resolves the phantasies of Moreau into thin air. Here is reality for you, familiar as it may be. It is wonderful how long it took French critics to discover that Manet was un peintre de race. He is very French in the French gallery where he now hangs.
It has all the qualities I have enumerated, and yet it falls short of Hals. It has not the breadth and scope of the great Dutchman. There is a sense of effort, on sent le souffle, and in Hals one never does. It is more bound together, it does not flow with the mighty and luminous ease of the chefs d'oeuvre at Haarlem. But is this Manet's final achievement, the last word he has to say? I think not.
For Manet's "Bon Bock" is one of the eternal types, a permanent national conception, as inherent in French life as Polichinelle, Pierrot, Monsieur Prud'homme, or the Baron Hulot. I have not seen the portrait for fifteen or eighteen years, and yet I see it as well as if it were hung on the wall opposite the table on which I am writing this page.
In his very valuable contribution to the history of the cause, Théodore Duret, the biographer and friend of Whistler and Manet has in his Les Peintres Impressionistes held the scales very much in favour of Manet's priority in the field over Monet.
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