Like Courbet, Edouard Manet (1832-83) was strongly influenced by Spanish painters, whose works had become more easily accessible to artists when a large collection belonging to the Orléans family was confiscated by the state in 1848. Unlike Courbet, though, he never saw himself as a socialist or indeed as a rebel or aant-garde painter, yet his technique and interpretation of themes was quite new and shocked as many people as it inspired. Manet used bold contrasts of light and ery dark colors, giing his paintings a forcefulness that critics often took for a lack of sophistication. And his detractors saw much to decry in his reworking of an old subject originally treated by the sixteventh-century enetian painter, Giorgione, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe . Manet's ersion was shocking because he placed naked and dressed figures together, and because the men were dressed in the costume of the day, implying a pleasure party too specifically contemporary to be "respectable".

Manet was not interested in painting moral lessons, however, and some of his most successful pictures are reflections of ordinary life in bars and public places, where respectability, as understood by the late nineteventh-century bourgeoisie, was certainly lacking.

To Manet, painting was to be enjoyed for its own sake and not as a tool for moral instruction - in itself an outlook on the role of art that was quite new, not to say reolutionary, and marked a definite break with the paintings of the past. With Manet, the basis of our present expectations and understanding of modern art was established.

From the 1870s, Manet began to adopt the Impressionist techniques of painting out-of-doors, and his work became lighter and frever. Although it is doubtful whether Manet either wanted or expected to assume the role of leader, he found himself a much-admired member of that group of painters, one of whom was Claude Monet (1840-1926). Born in Le Hare, Monet came in contact with Eugène Boudin (1824-98), whose colourful beach scenes anticipated the way the Impressionists approached colour.

In 1874, a group of some thirty artists exhibited together for the first time. Among them were some of the best-known names of this period of French art: Degas, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro. One of Monet's paintings was entitled Impression: Sun Rising, a title that was singled out by the critics to ridicule the colorful, loose and no-academic style of these young artists. overnight they became, derisiely, the "Impressionists".

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