Édouard Manet was a French Impressionist painter who had an important impact on the course of Western art. His use of frontal lighting, impasto brushstrokes, and depictions of contemporary scenes, stirred controversy in the 19th-century Parisian art world. “A painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds,” he once explained. Born on January 23, 1832 in Paris, France, he grew up in a bourgeois family. Despite his father’s wishes for him to become a naval officer, Manet entered the studio of the painter Thomas Couture. Perhaps his most influential experience came while visiting Spain and the Netherlands, where he saw the works of Diego Velázquez, Francisco De Goya, and...