Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art. For the past few years, we've been filming

the biggest exhibitions in the world

about some of the greatest artists and art in history.

Not only do we record these landmark shows,

but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes

of the galleries and museums concerned.

We then use the exhibition as a springboard

to take a broader look.

In this film we focus on the first-ever exhibition

devoted to the portraits of the pre-eminent

19th century French painter and pioneering impressionist

Edouard Manet.

Called Manet: Portraying Life,

it was held here at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

On occasion, the Impressionist painters we know so well -

Renoir, Monet, Degas, Pissarro and so on -

suffer a little from being all grouped together

as if they were an interchangeable all-painting mass.

The truth is that they were all very different personalities and very different painters.

But one of the things they did share was an enormous respect

for the creativity and innovation of Edouard Manet,

a painter now considered by many to be the father of modern art.

This compelling show held at the Royal Academy illustrated why

and allowed us to look afresh at this great artist.

We'll be exploring all aspects of the exhibition,

combining an analysis and discussion with specially-invited guests,

along with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look

at how the exhibition came together.

We'll also be exploring Manet's life

and looking at how he himself viewed his work.

Manet is, in many ways, misunderstood.

Frequently labelled an Impressionist,

he never considered himself part of the group.

He was first and foremost a painter of the modern world,

of the rapid-evolving city of 19th-century Paris

and the people he knew in it.

His family, his friends and acquaintances.

What this exhibition celebrates is how Manet managed

to transform the portrait into a means of delving deeper

into the world in which he lived.

With work spanning his entire career, Manet: Portraying Life

is the first-ever exhibition devoted to the portraiture of Edouard Manet.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Royal Academy

of Arts in London and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio,

and was five years in the making.

It consists of more than 50 paintings

arranged over a series of themed rooms...

..and sets out to establish the ways in which Manet combined the portrait

with images that depicted the modern world,

translating his sitters into actors in scenes from contemporary life.

I have no doubt in my mind

that Manet is one of THE great artists of the Western tradition...

..both as a maker of images

and as a practitioner -

the actual making of the art -

and also, I think, as a radical thinker.

He really goes back and rethinks and questions

what his art can do and what it can contribute.

He was a genius.

And I don't use that word loosely. He certainly had the self-confidence

and the nerve to proceed

in the face of great criticism.

He didn't have to earn money making painting,

he was from a family that had means,

but he had, as Kandinsky would say,

the inner compulsion to create.

Edouard Manet is one of THE most

enigmatic figures in the history of art.

We may think we know him - a painter of radical images,

of nudes that shocked his world, as the father of Impressionism,

the first emphatically modern artist -

but the reality is far more complicated.

What is not in doubt is that Manet

was one of the greatest artists that ever lived,

someone who pushed the boundaries of what art could do.

What he set out to do -

in terms of a radical rethinking about technique,

a blurring of the genres,

the pursuit of new,

in some ways, ways of depicting subject matter -

made him very much the father of modern art.

Now, I'm joined by the co-curator of the exhibition

MaryAnne Stevens from the Royal Academy.

Standing in front of a late self-portrait by the man himself.

MaryAnne, why is Manet a modern artist?

What makes him the father of modern art, do you think?

I think when you're looking at even something like this,

you find yourself thinking,

'He started with no preconception.'

He himself said that he started every single subject

as if he had never seen that particular subject before.

And he goes absolutely back to square one

and builds up the painting according to the demands

of the relationship between him, the subject and the way

the paint goes on the surface of the canvas.

Now, from my perspective,

that's an incredibly risky approach to take.

But what's fascinating is that the risk is there

and you feel with each painting, he pushes it to the limit,

but he doesn't quite fall off the precipice.

Something just holds it back.

Which brings us to the thesis of the show - Manet and portraiture.

You're saying he treats portraiture in a totally different way.

He blurs distinction between portraiture

and what is broadly called genre painting.

Yes. I mean, the real argument of the show is, first of all,

it started with the notion that nobody had done

an exhibition about Manet as a portraitist

and yet he painted portraits from his very early years,

right the way through to the point at which he dies in early 1883.

If he's going to paint the contemporary world,

modernity,

he has to paint people who are real in it, in his paintings.

He just can't conjure up anybody who might have walked off the street.

He needs to know who they are.

So, he uses the people that he's painted in portraits -

his family, his friends, his models on a regular basis -

and he transposes them and turns them

into actors in his scenes of contemporary life.

So, for him, portraiture

is only occasionally in and of itself interesting.

In a way, it opens the gate

to a different way of looking and seeing.

It forces him to do things he wouldn't otherwise do.

It forces him to do things that he wouldn't otherwise do

and I think it also forces him, but he accepts it very willingly,

to absolutely rethink what is meant by portraiture.

And that, again, is him pushing the boundaries

as he does in so much else in his art.

All of which will reveal itself throughout that exhibition.

Thank you very much. We're now going to take a look

behind the scenes and find out more

about how the exhibition itself came together.

When curating an exhibition which involves, of course,

the argument of the exhibition being determined,

the selection of works to support that argument

on the walls of the exhibition galleries being determined,

the next stage has to be,

'How is it going to work within the spaces themselves?'

There's a bit of virgin territory there.

Given that we work here at the Royal Academy

with fixed galleries -

these were built in the mid-19th century -

we really have to work with them rather than against them.

If you've got the... (INDISTINCT SPEECH)

'So you think very carefully in terms of chapters.'

Each chapter being determined by the spaces, each gallery space.

And it's at that stage that you enter

into a conversation with the designer.

Basically laying out the argument of the exhibition,

laying out why you've selected the works that you have

for each of the spaces, and then beginning

the process of 'Will they fit? How will they hang on the walls?

What colour you will paint the walls.

How you will orchestrate the passage of the visitor

from the beginning of the exhibition to the end of the exhibition.'

On 23rd January 1832,

Edouard Manet was born in the heart of Paris,

here in his parent's comfortable second-floor apartment.

His family was upper-middle class. Wealthy and well connected.

Manet's father was a senior civil servant

in the Ministry of Justice and rose to become a judge.

Manet's mother was the daughter of a diplomat.

The young Manet struggled at school and was easily distracted.

An uncle, seeing that Edouard was interested in art,

tried to help matters by paying for drawing lessons

and taking him to the art galleries in the Louvre.

By his mid-teens, Manet had firmly declared

his desire to become an artist.

But his father wanted him to follow in his legal footsteps,

something Edouard stubbornly resisted.

So, instead, a third option was proposed -

he could try for a career in the French Navy.

Manet's going to sea

was a kind of compromise on the part of the family.

It was obvious that he wasn't going to study law.

And they hoped that he would go into the navy,

but he failed the entrance exam.

So there was a kind of way of getting into the navy

by either going into the merchant navy

or, as it turns out, sailing south of the equator.

So he got a position as a sailor on a boat that was going to Rio.

And he was very seasick at first and then very, very, very bored.

So it wasn't a passion. He loved the sea,

but it was more about his family forcing a kind of gap year on him,

so that he could decide what he was going to do.

Shortly after his return from sea, in June 1849,

when he was still only 17 years old,

Manet met the woman who was to become his wife.

Suzanne Leenhoff was a 19-year-old Dutch piano tutor

employed by the Manet household.

And, at some point in the winter of 1849,

Edouard and Suzanne began a relationship.

And back in the first gallery of the exhibition,

in a room exploring portraits of Manet's family,

is Suzanne Leenhoff - shown here at the piano in 1868.

Manet and Suzanne's relationship was a complicated one.

Two years after they met, she bore a son

that she called Leon Edouard.

And many people subsequently believed that that was Manet's son.

Manet and Suzanne did eventually marry,

but some 14 years after they'd first met

and, significantly, after the death of Manet's father,

who some believed was actually Leon's father.

Now, amidst all this confusion and complexity,

one important thing emerges as far as Manet's art's concerned.

Namely, that Leon was an important early model

featuring in 17 paintings by Manet.

And it's an image of Leon that dominates

the first major work that we're going to look at - the Luncheon.

Painted in 1868, the Luncheon is one of Manet's greatest,

yet most enigmatic works.

It's an image dominated by the figure of Leon.

Though he stands centre-stage, his position at the edge

of a lunch table suggests his imminent departure,

that his mind is elsewhere, reinforced by his distant gaze

as he stares blankly out beyond the viewer.

Around him are a series of contrived still lives,

a sword and armour, oysters and a lemon on the table.

For a time, Claude Monet sat as the model

for the bearded figure at the table

but, in the end, another artist took up the job.

Auguste Rousselin, a neighbour of the Manet's

in Boulogne, where they spent the summer,

and where this painting is sought to be located.

And while the female figure in the background

remains unidentified, the strange disengaged poses

of all three figures make any kind of narrative reading of the picture

very hard to make.

By 1849, Manet's father had finally allowed him

to pursue an artistic career.

Manet then began six years of study

in the studio of the painter Thomas Couture.

Manet's period in Couture's studio was very much that of a student.

It was no longer the kind of apprenticeship system

that had prevailed in, say, Renaissance times.

And it was definitely about learning to draw from the model,

learning to paint with the supervision of the teacher.

It was much more like an art school today would be.

Though a traditionalist in some respects,

Couture was an interesting mentor

for he had certain contemporary concerns.

Couture's acknowledged masterpiece was a large-scale history painting

called The Romans of the Decadence,

in which the debauched Roman revellers represented

what Couture considered to be the moral decline in his own day.

It's a big history painting,

but it's about the morals of the period.

And Manet wants to be a history painter.

He wants to express, erm, I mean, the issues of the day.

He wants to turn history painting into modernity.

Couture encouraged his pupils to find their own artistic language

rather than slavishly follow current conventions.

And he stressed the need for spontaneity

and the rapidly-rendered sketch.

But outside Couture's studio, another artist was challenging

the conventions of French painting to an even greater degree.

In 1850, the realist painter Gustave Courbet

exhibited this monumental work, Burial At Ornans, at the Paris Salon.

The painting was a manifesto for a new kind of art,

Realism, a radical movement that sought to replace

romanticised images from the past with depictions of ordinary people,

contemporary figures in scenes from everyday life.

Accordingly, the Salon was scandalised

and Courbet's position as the leading avant-garde artist in Paris was assured.

It was against this backdrop that Manet emerged.

Without doubt, Manet drew on the lessons of realism.

But, at the same time, he admired much of the art of the old masters,

including Dutch art of the 17th century.

But by far his greatest passion was for the art of Spain.

For Manet, certain Spanish painting offered an alternative

to the idealised, classically-inspired art of Italy.

And the artist he revered above all others

was Diego Velazquez, who he called the greatest artist ever.

There are a number of examples in the exhibition

which show the influence of Spanish art on Manet.

Works such as the Street Singer, showing a fashionably-attired woman

emerging from a cafe, clutching a guitar and eating fruit

owe something to the art of Spain, both in subject and style.

But it's this work, The Tragic Actor,

that most pointedly references Spanish painting.

Not least a specific work by Velazquez himself.

Joining me is the Spanish expert and chief curator

of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dr Xavier Bray.

Now, this is a theatrical portrait in every sense, isn't it?

It shows the great French tragic actor Rouviere.

He's playing the role of Hamlet.

He dies, I think, before it's completed

and Manet has to use other friends as models.

One for the legs, I think, one for the main body.

But that's not what really stands out about his picture.

No. It's a clear homage to Velazquez and everybody who saw it,

even before it was exhibited in 1867 at the Salon,

everybody said this owes everything to Pablo de Valladolid,

one of the great portraits of a court jester by Velazquez,

which Manet would have seen at the Prado in 1865.

In the summer of 1865, he finally makes his journey to Madrid.

And, of course, is completely ebloui, completely amazed by Velazquez.

And this is, on his return, the homage that he paints.

And the way you really pick it up straightaway

is this neutral backdrop. Velazquez was just totally

unabashed about using neutral backdrops

to bring the figure forward.

And this is the kind of modernity that Manet really wanted.

He wanted to have that confirmation that Velazquez was the key

to what he was gonna be doing back in Paris.

Manet was a Parisian through and through.

But during his lifetime, Paris underwent

a radical transformation.

Manet embraced change. He lived all his life in and around

the new suburbs in the northwest of the city.

And he was a great enthusiast for the expanding railways,

one of which snaked into the Gare Saint-Lazare close to his home.

MAN: 'One day coming back from Versailles,

I got up on the footplate of a locomotive,

alongside the engine driver and fireman.

It was a wonderful sight.

Theirs is a dog's life, but it's those men

who are the heroes of today.'

Manet's world was essentially that of the boulevard,

the salon and the cafe.

But this vision of Paris, so familiar to us today,

emerged almost entirely through the 19th century -

from a city that had evolved down the ages,

with a warren of medieval streets at it's heart,

to the city of vast, straight, spacious boulevards.

These iconic thoroughfares are the product

of a remarkable period of urban planning

that took place through the middle of the 19th century

under the direction of Georges-Eugene Haussmann.

Haussmann had been commanded by the emperor, Napoleon III,

to regularise the city at huge expense.

MAN: 'Manet and I strolled together through the midst of demolitions

intersected by gaping holes

where the ground had already been levelled.

House-breakers stood out.

White against a wall less white,

which was collapsing under their blows,

covering them in a cloud of dust.

For a long time, Manet remained absorbed in admiration of this scene.

I think that the development of Paris in the second half

of the 19th century under Napoleon III

and Haussmann was extremely important for Manet.

What he saw was whole districts being ripped down

and new buildings being put up, new boulevards being created.

Really the centre of modern Paris, as we know it today, being created

and he was fascinated by that.

Manet's enthusiasm was matched by that of his friend,

the poet Charles Baudelaire.

From 1858, the two became close companions,

meeting most days to stroll through the boulevards and parks of the city.

They held common ideas about art and poetry

and Baudelaire wrote an influential essay entitled The Painter Of Modern Life.

In it he described an artist who mixed with the crowd,

but who remained an impartial observer of behaviour and fashion.

A figure he called the flaneur - the stroller, the ambler.

MAN: 'For the flaneur, it is an endless source of pleasure

to enrol in the multitude, in the ebb and flow...

and to observe the thousands of floating existences

which drift about the underworld of a great city.'

Such an observer was Manet.

One of Manet's most strikingly original works -

Music In The Tuileries Gardens - is a complex multi-figured portrait

and a direct statement by Manet about contemporary life.

Within it, we see portraits of Manet's family, friends and acquaintances,

from his brother Eugene Manet to the writer Zacharie Astruc.

And where some portraits are rendered with a degree of precision,

others, including that of Baudelaire, are given only a cursory treatment.

The painting is also a self-portrait,

as Manet himself is pictured at the far left,

just on the edge of the canvas.

But beyond being a literal likeness of Manet and his circle,

this is a kind of cultural self-portrait

and, above all, an affirmation of Baudelaire's ideas of modernity,

of the heroism of the transient beauty of the modern life

and the important role of the flaneur

in interpreting and representing that beauty.

Joining me in front of Music in the Tuileries Gardens

is the writer and film maker Iain Sinclair, who's written

extensively about the experience of the modern city.

Iain, when you look at this painting, does it scream modern Paris to you?

It shouts about modernity,

it shouts about the contact with Baudelaire,

who is looking at cities in a new way and giving the germs of ideas

that will play on for poets for generations.

It's difficult to work out what exactly is happening.

We know there's a concert being given, but there's no sign of the orchestra.

There's no real sense of where they are, no focal point.

I think its enigmatic and almost surreal quality

is a germ of modernity, certainly.

And the action is not in the frame.

The music is elsewhere. What are these people doing here?

It's like this hugely clotted gathering in a strange space.

They are here because they have moral or social importance.

They're all placed and positioned in there

as if they represented virtues in some way

and as if the music was off-screen and something that was haunting them

but which we, as a reader, would have to bring ourselves to the action.

Interesting that...

this has been described as a kind of cultural self-portrait by Manet.

And he locates himself in the picture but only on the extreme left.

So he's in the picture, but he's detached to a certain extent.

Well, it's the gaze, the Manet gaze.

He's looking at us more than at the picture.

But what you see in it is almost a precursor

of the artist of the moment in that it's a wonderful example of self-promotion.

He's got all the possible critics who could write about him into the picture.

All the dignitaries, all the social figures, all the patrons.

He's lined them all up and squeezed them into this one picture.

Within a year of painting Music In The Tuileries Gardens,

Manet's artistic radicalism would provoke an outcry

at the very heart of the French artistic establishment, the Paris Salon.

Success for the many painters in France

was almost totally dependent on being accepted by the Paris Salon,

the annual artistic showcase that had been established

more than a century earlier at the Louvre Palace.

A jury recruited from members of Paris' artistic elite

would select the paintings for exhibition,

which were then hung floor-to-ceiling.

It was enormous. There were thousands of paintings

and pieces of sculpture on view.

And they were arranged in a way

which is almost unbelievable to us today.

You would put paintings together

in whatever configuration you could fit them.

And also, the rooms were organised alphabetically.

So this wasn't an ideal way of displaying paintings,

but it was the space in which to make your name.

And for Manet, it remained THE most important place

in which to display his paintings.

This is The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel.

It was exhibited in 1863 and proves that in that year,

the Salon jury were not afraid of nudity.

Indeed, the critics warmly praised the painting

and its classical style.

But this painting - well, this was too much.

It was Manet's 1863 submission.

A painting called The Luncheon On The Grass

or Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe.

This is an image of a nude female relaxing after lunch

with two men dressed in the clothes of contemporary dandies.

It was easily interpreted as a naked prostitute

sitting in a city park with two young students.

The stark contemporary nature of Manet's scene

offended the Salon jury

and the painting, to Manet's intense disappointment, was rejected.

In 1863, Manet wasn't alone in being rejected by the Salon jury.

2,200 were accepted, but 2,800 were rejected.

This unprecedented number of rejects led to a public outcry

and calls for an alternative exhibition to be set up.

And so, a Salon des Refuses was organised,

where 1,500 of the rejected paintings were put on display.

It was a sensation with thousands visiting every day.

Among them was a new phenomenon in the art world, the art critic.

And the painting the new critics tore into above all

was Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe.

MAN: 'Manet will show talent

once he learns drawing and perspective,

and taste once he stops choosing subjects

for the sake of scandal.'

MAN: 'I fail to see what could have induced

such a distinguished and intelligent artist

to adopt such an absurd composition.'

I'm now joined by Larry Nichols, the co-curator of the exhibition,

who is from the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio

and who has a special relationship with this painting

which is of Manet's great friend, Antonin Proust, the politician,

who's also trained as an artist, I think.

Larry, what is the significance for you of this work?

This picture was exhibited in the Salon in 1880

and some 44 years later, on the open market in New York,

the founder of the Toledo Museum of Art,

Edward Drummond Libbey, purchases this painting,

leaves it to the museum at his death in 1925

and it goes on view January 26.

And it's been part of our collection and one of the highlights

of our museum's holdings and is to this moment.

I've been fortunate to work in service,

curate at that museum for some two decades now

and I said, 'Someday, I might wanna participate

in this painting being in an exhibit on his portraiture.'

And the way the profession works, I heard that London,

my colleague and friend, MaryAnne Stevens,

was thinking of doing something with Manet as well.

And we got together, we said, 'Let's do Manet,

let's do Manet's portraiture.'

And this a linchpin then and the genesis of this project.

Many people, now having made part of this journey with us through this exhibition,

will look at this and think, in relative terms,

we're on safer ground, there's an element of the conventional.

Oh, sure. Mm-hm. But do you think there's a radical underpinning

or is this Manet playing a more conventional game?

The composition is, er...

In the terms you've just set up, the composition is traditional.

I was in the National Gallery down the street not many days ago

looking at Titian portraits.

And you can find gloves just like that,

and the stance and the arm akimbo.

This intelligent artist knew his art history.

Composition, technique - it's radical and it's modern.

So, I'm giving you two answers there.

He is applying paint to canvas in ways that is new for the time.

The beard, the light on it, the boutonniere.

He's applying paint... There were individuals who thought it looked...

critics who thought it was unfinished.

I mean, this is as finished as he ever gets.

One of the great misconceptions about Manet was that he was an Impressionist.

But he never considered himself part of the group.

In fact, despite his friendship with the young artists

who were dubbed Impressionists,

he was at pains to remain separate, to stand apart.

By the late 1860s, Manet was well established

as the most celebrated avant-garde artist in Paris.

Around him gathered a group of young artists,

including Degas, Monet and Renoir.

They met in cafes, mostly in those new suburbs

to the northwest of the city.

Ideas about art were argued, exchanged and advanced.

This was the crucible of the art movement

that came to be called Impressionism.

In 1874, these and other artists decided to hold their own exhibition,

here at the studio of the photographer Nadar.

One painting in the exhibition was this by Claude Monet.

It was called Impression, Sunrise.

A critic hated it and mocked this new style of Impressionism.

Manet's name was associated with the movement,

but he never agreed to exhibit with them.

Manet is not an Impressionist for a whole variety of reasons,

although people tend to think of him very much as being an Impressionist.

First of all, to be an Impressionist

really one had to have exhibited with the Impressionist group.

They had eight group shows between 1874 and 1886.

And Manet was invited on several occasions

to join with the group and he refused on every occasion.

But beyond his reluctance to exhibit,

Manet's approach to painting differed fundamentally from that of the Impressionists.

Working outdoors, en plein air, the Impressionists set out to capture

the fleeting effects of light on their subjects through an innovative approach

to brushwork and colour.

I think he was very intrigued by a looser technique,

a lighter palette, the possibility of working out of doors.

He didn't enjoy it terribly, but he gave it a try.

But it's very interesting, he never lost...

two things. One was the sense of form.

He never breaks up his form in the way that the Impressionists do,

where they allow light to fracture the form and disperse it.

He holds on to the importance of form but, at the same time,

constantly plays with this two-dimensionality,

which the Impressionists only really get to

in the 1880s, after Manet's death.

Painted in 1873, The Railway is one of Manet's great works.

It's an encapsulation of his ability to fuse the portrait, the genre seen,

and a depiction of modern life.

The subject of the painting's title barely appears in the frame,

and yet the modernity of the railway below,

which had just opened five years before,

and the Pont de l'Europe just visible in the background,

emphatically declare it as a scene of contemporary life.

And then, staring out almost confronting the viewer,

is a young woman, the model Victorine Meurent

dressed in the latest autumn fashions.

She's accompanied by an anonymous little girl

whose focus is on the noise and steam of the locomotives below.

The two occupy a compressed space

between the picture plane and the iron bars of the railings,

that beat a rhythm across the composition.

The painting was accepted at the Salon.

But, like so many of Manet's previous works,

The Railway frustrated critics, one of whom complained,

'Is this a double portrait or a subject picture?'

And in many ways, that was the point for Manet.

It was both and neither.

I'm joined in front of The Railway by the actor,

director and Manet enthusiast Fiona Shaw.

Fiona, this again, I suppose superficially,

is a very straightforward picture. But it is enigmatic, too.

Do you make sense of it easily? Well, looking at it now, I...

it does have a hint of sort of what became later a sentimental

painting, as you think, of a lady and a child and...

I suppose what is striking about the painting is that it's set

in an urban context and he was definitely trying

to get away from the countryside.

I suppose it's very daring to put a rather nice, innocent lady

and the little girl, but against this new Paris

that's building up behind. I think that's probably what the point of itis.

Picking up on the image of innocence - cos you're right,

it's a girl in a fashionable, pretty frock,

there's a woman in very fashionable attire

with a dog on her lap, reading. But in the flesh,

isn't there something quite confrontational about her face?

Don't you feel you've invaded a space that you

might not have done or shouldn't have done?

It's interesting you say that because I think in general, where he uses this gaze of a female

looking straight at the camera as it were,

is he trying to say it's him looking through these women's eyes?

It's a very strange way of painting something.

It's not a painting of the woman and the child, is it?

It's somehow a painting in which the woman and the child,

or the woman, is in dialogue with us.

So it's not of something, it's about something.

And I suppose in this case, it's about,

yes, maybe her bewilderment at being in a new country

that's becoming new, that France is changing under her feet.

She seems such a classical bourgeois lady.

She so... You know, she so isn't.

Yes, actually, as I look at it now, she's almost questioning.

There's something about the alienating nature

of modern life or of the city. Yes.

Some of Manet's visions have this kind of, you know,

people in the Tuileries Gardens together. Yes.

But a lot of the time people are together but isolated.

This is very loudly that, I think.

It is, and she's very... It's very vintage Manet in that you know it's Manet.

It's something to do with the black choker.

He does define the character as though it's in the world,

whether it's going to last long or whether the world is a nice world to be in.

But he's very definite about her. She's definitely there

for all the book and the lap dog and everything.

And there's something very lonely about it.

By the end of the 1870s, there was a sense that Manet's work

had been eclipsed to a certain extent by the radical steps

taken by the Impressionists to make a new form of painting.

But in the very last years of his life

and already suffering the effects of the syphilis that would kill him,

Manet created one final great work.

MAN: 'This theatre.

It is the only place in Paris which reeks

so exquisitely of paid love and wearied corruptions.'

In Manet's last great work, the Bar At The Folies-Bergere,

we're confronted by a direct gaze

like few others in the history of art.

There's a sense that perhaps he knew it would stand as a final statement,

an encapsulation of all that he tried to do.

The Bar At The Folies-Bergere is a true masterpiece

and it was meant to be so because Manet was ill.

He knew that his doctor, erm...

..didn't have the means to cure him.

And it is also a kind of farewell to the Paris world...

..that he loved to enjoy before.

So he tried to, well, sum up everything in one painting.

The barmaid stands in place,

a bar offering bottles of champagne, flowers and fruit.

But with the lights and ambience of the nightclub

visible in the mirror behind her.

Her face betrays a weary resignation,

totally at odds with her surroundings.

And then, in an extraordinary twist, off to the right, a mirror image,

we see the face of her customer,

the viewer, in effect, us.

Manet died, aged 51, on 30th April 1883,

suffering from advanced syphilis,

and having failed to recover from the amputation of his left leg

earlier in the month due to gangrene.

Among the pallbearers at his funeral were his great friends

Antonin Proust, Emile Zola and Claude Monet.

Edgar Degas was reported to have said after his death,

'He was more important than we realised'.

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