Édouard Manet (Paris 1832 – Paris 1883), the founder of French modern painting, was born in Paris 190 years ago. In
his work, the artist merged a realistic vision of the world with the painting traditions of the
old masters. By placing the established image of the female nude into the nineteenth-
century environment, Manet caused an uproar amongst the contemporary public, as
evidenced by his famous paintings The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia from 1863. In his
paintings, Manet portrayed the contemporary person in scenes from the urban environment
and we can join Charles Baudelaire in calling him “the painter of modern life”.
