Édouard Manet was born in Paris into a prosperous family and studied under Thomas Couture while copying Old Masters in the Louvre. Spanish painting—especially Velázquez and Goya—left a lasting mark on his brushwork and palette. He never fully joined the Impressionist exhibitions, yet his café, boulevard, and studio scenes supplied that circle with modern subject matter and a blunt, contemporary light. Baudelaire and Zola were among early defenders who saw that break with Salon polish as deliberate.
Key works include Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), rejected by the Salon and shown at the Salon des Refusés; Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay); and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882, Courtauld Gallery, London). Earlier canvases such as The Spanish Singer (1860, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) already show his preference for flat, assertive paint over academic finish.
Manet’s abbreviated modelling, frontal compositions, and refusal of narrative polish unsettled mid-century critics. Those same qualities made him a bridge between Realism and the later nineteenth-century avant-garde, and a reference point for painters who treated modern urban life as worthy of grand-format art.