EDOUARD MANET: HIS WORK, HIS INFLUENCE


As I have said, Edouard Manet has not been entirely the originator of
the Impressionist technique. It is the work of Claude Monet which
presents the most complete example of it, and which also came first as
regards date. But it is very difficult to determine such cases of
priority, and it is, after all, rather useless. A technique cannot be
invented in a day. In this case it was the result of long
investigations, in which Manet and Renoir participated, and it is
necessary to unite under the collective name of Impressionists a group
of men, tied by friendship, who made a simultaneous effort towards
originality, all in about the same spirit, though frequently in very
different ways. As in the case of the Pre-Raphaelites, it was first of
all friendship, then unjust derision, which created the solidarity of
the Impressionists. But the Pre-Raphaelites, in aiming at an idealistic
and symbolic art, were better agreed upon the intellectual principles
which permitted them at once to define a programme. The Impressionists
who were only united by their temperaments, and had made it their first
aim to break away from all school programmes, tried simply to do
something new, with frankness and freedom.

Manet was, in their midst, the personality marked out at the same time
by their admiration, and by the attacks of the critics for the post of
standard-bearer. A little older than his friends, he had already, quite
alone, raised heated discussions by the works in his first manner. He
was considered an innovator, and it was by instinctive admiration that
his first friends, Whistler, Legros, and Fantin-Latour, were gradually
joined by Marcelin Desboutin, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro,