Édouard Manet

Manet spent his career trying to be accepted by the Salon and became the model for everyone who rejected it. Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and Olympia both caused scandals, not because of nudity, which was standard, but because the women were unmistakably contemporary Parisians rather than goddesses, and they look straight out at you.

The paint handling was the other offence. Flat areas of tone, edges left abrupt, mid tones skipped entirely. Critics complained the figures looked like playing cards. He had taken it from Velazquez and Hals, not from invention.

He knew the Impressionists, exhibited with none of them, and kept submitting to the Salon until the end. A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, painted in 1882 with its deliberately impossible mirror reflection, was his last major work. He died the following year at fifty one.