![]() Gare Saint Lazare and Pont de l'Europe (c.1868) So let us take a look at the image and see if we can understand Manet’s thought process as he put brush to canvas. In some ways it is an unusual painting and we struggle to understand what it is all about and Manet never revealed his thoughts behind the work. This was the only painting by Manet that was accepted by the Salon jury for their 1874 exhibition. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The painting is simply entitled The Railway which he started in 1872 and completed the following year. It is a painting of modern life and modern Paris and would no doubt have pleased his friend, Beaudelaire. Today I am returning to the French artist Édouard Manet and looking at another of his paintings. ![]() His advice to Manet was that his art should depict a contemporary realism and that Manet should become le peintre de la vie moderne. “…By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable…” He seems to me crushed and stunned by shock…”īeaudelaire believed in modernité in art and in his book, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, he stressed the importance of it saying that it was very important that art must be held accountable to capture the modern experience. “…Manet has great talent, a talent which will stand the test of time. Lois Hyslop the American author and Beaudelaire specialist wrote about this supportive role in her 1980 book Beaudelaire, Man of His Time, and she quoted his comments with regards Manet: It was an important friendship for Manet, as during the times his work was being harshly criticised, Beaudelaire was very supportive of him. ![]() During Édouard Manet’s life he was great friends with the writer Charles Beaudelaire, the French poet, philosopher and art critic, and from around 1855 they became constant companions with the two of them frequently going off on sketching trips. ![]()
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