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Manet’s images of courtship and love, robbed as they are of their mythic scaffolding, are bold indeed. His women are seen as strong, autonomous beings, firmly saying no to centuries of conventional behavior.
Manet exhibited three paintings, including the scandalous Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). The public professed to be shocked by the subject of a nude woman blithely enjoying a picnic in the company of two fully clothed men, while a second, scantily clad woman bathes in a stream.
Manet drew to a close a long series of "women on a sofa" with this picture from 1873. His model is Nina de Callias (1844-1884), a capricious woman, alternately elated and depressed, with a neurotic temperament that alcohol soon led her to insanity and a premature death at the age of thirty-nine.
Manet continued to paint portraits of women, still lifes, landscapes, and flowers, even from his sickbed (he was unable to visit his studio in the last months of his life).
Edouard Manet's Portraits of Women. Over the course of Edouard Manet's (1832-1883) career, the artist completed more than one hundred portraits. Nearly three-quarters of them are portraits of women.
Biography. Born in Paris in 1832 to a wealthy family, Edouard Manet showed promise in drawing and caricature from an early age. After twice being denied admission to France’s prestigious Naval College, he enrolled in 1850 at the studio of academic artist Thomas Couture.
In innovative pictures set at fashionable Parisian locales and staged with models in his studio, Manet sought to characterize the women of his era—and to a lesser extent the men—for posterity. The parisienne , a social type that defined youthful, feminine chic, occupied much of his attention.
