Édouard Manet

In May 1865 the Paris Salon, the official exhibition that could make or break a French painter, hung a picture called Olympia, and the crowd came close to rioting in front of it. Édouard Manet had painted a naked woman reclining on a bed, looking straight out at the viewer with complete composure, a servant behind her holding flowers from an admirer. Everyone in the room knew what they were looking at, a Parisian courtesan, painted life-size, at a moment when the city was in the grip of a syphilis epidemic that touched almost every family. Manet's own father had died of the disease three years earlier.

Visitors jabbed at the canvas with umbrellas and the guards moved it high on the wall, out of reach. What offended them was partly the flat, frank way it was painted, with none of the soft mythological haze that usually excused a nude. Manet had done something similar two years before with the Déjeuner sur l'herbe, a picnic of clothed men and one naked woman that scandalised the Salon des Refusés in 1863.

He was born in 1832 into a comfortable Paris family that wanted him in the law, and he spent his life half-inside the establishment he kept upsetting, chasing the official medals even as younger painters treated him as the father of a new way of seeing. Those younger ones became the Impressionists. Manet showed with them in spirit but insisted on the Salon. His own syphilis caught up with him slowly. In 1883 his left leg was amputated after gangrene set in, and he died in Paris eleven days later, at 51.