Manet and Monet: The Friendship Behind the Name Everyone Confuses

Aug 15

9 min read

Updated: Aug 29

They are not the same painter, and the confusion is not new. Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) met at the 1865 Salon de Paris by accident — the older painter, Manet, had walked into the exhibition rooms at the Palais de l'Industrie in central Paris on the opening morning, found a wall of newspaper critics arguing in front of Olympia, his frontal-nude portrait of a Paris courtesan that had become the scandal of the season, and noticed with mounting fury that the small seascape hanging directly next to Olympia was signed with a name almost identical to his own. The seascape, La Pointe de la Hève à Marée Basse, was the first Salon submission of an unknown twenty-four-year-old painter from Le Havre named Claude Monet. Manet, who was thirty-three and the most controversial painter in Paris, believed at first the signature was a deliberate provocation — he assumed Monet had stolen part of his name to hitchhike on his notoriety. He stormed out of the Salon. The friendship that began with that misunderstanding lasted eighteen years. Monet, by then a sixty-five-year-old widower painting water lilies at Giverny, would be a pallbearer at Manet's funeral in 1883. This essay reads the eight active years of the friendship — what they painted together, what they took from each other, and why their names are still confused today.

Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863 — Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), 1863. Oil on canvas, 208 × 264.5 cm. Held in a Paris collection. Manet submitted the painting to the 1863 Salon de Paris jury, who rejected it. It was shown that summer at the parallel Salon des Refusés authorized by Emperor Napoleon III after a record number of jury rejections. The picture shows two clothed bourgeois men in mid-conversation with a naked woman looking directly at the viewer, while a second clothed woman wades in a stream in the background. The composition is borrowed from a 1510 engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael; the nudity is contemporary and confrontational. Le Déjeuner is the conventional starting point of "modern" painting in French art history.

Manet's 1863 scandal: the painting that broke polite painting

Manet was already, by 1863, the most controversial young painter in Paris. The son of a senior magistrate and a diplomat's daughter, he had trained for six years in the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture and had broken with Couture's history-painting practice around 1860 to develop the flat, unmodelled, contemporary-subject style that would define his career. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, submitted to the 1863 Salon under the title Le Bain, was rejected by the jury. The Emperor Napoleon III, hearing of an unusually high rejection rate that year (over three thousand works refused), authorised a parallel exhibition for the rejected works in a separate wing of the Palais de l'Industrie — the now-famous Salon des Refusés. Manet's Déjeuner was the central scandal of the Refusés: a contemporary-dress picnic with a naked Paris model looking directly at the viewer, two fully clothed bourgeois men in tweed beside her, a clothed woman wading in the stream behind. The nudity was not classical. The setting was not allegorical. Critics across the political spectrum read the painting as a deliberate insult.

Manet, Olympia, 1863 (shown 1865) — Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 130.5 × 191 cm. Painted the same year as Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe but withheld from public exhibition until the 1865 Salon, where it became the scandal of the season. The model Victorine Meurent reclines on white sheets, looking directly at the viewer with her left hand placed flat across her thigh in a gesture of refusal. A Black servant brings flowers from an unseen client. A black cat arches at the foot of the bed. The painting borrows the pose of Titian's 1538 Venus of Urbino but updates every element to contemporary Paris: the goddess becomes a courtesan, the obedient maid becomes a Black woman, the sleeping dog becomes a hissing cat. It was at this painting that Claude Monet was hanging his Pointe de la Hève seascape next door when Manet walked in furious in May 1865.

The painting that hung beside the Déjeuner two years later, in 1865 — Olympia — was the consolidation of the same project. The model Victorine Meurent, who had been the naked woman in the Déjeuner, was now lying on a bed staring directly at the buyer of the picture with her left hand placed flat across her thigh in a gesture of refusal that contemporaries instantly recognised as the standard pose of a Paris prostitute receiving a client. A Black servant brings flowers from an unseen patron. A black cat arches at the foot of the bed. Critics were even more violent than they had been about the Déjeuner. The Salon hung Olympia at the highest point of the wall so visitors had to look up at it; the picture was guarded by a uniformed policeman against the threats of slashing reported by the press. It was directly beside this painting that Monet's twenty-four-year-old seascape was hanging on the opening morning when Manet walked in.

Monet's 1872 sunrise and the naming of Impressionism

By the early 1870s the misunderstanding had become a friendship. Manet had recognised Monet's seriousness as a painter — they were introduced formally a few months after the 1865 Salon incident by the painter Carolus-Duran, who had stationed himself at the Café Guerbois on the Boulevard des Batignolles to broker the peace — and Manet had begun to defend Monet's work in print to his older Realist friends Courbet, Baudelaire, and Zola. Monet had moved to Argenteuil, a riverside town on the Seine eleven kilometres downstream from Paris, in late 1871 after returning from London (where he and Pissarro had spent the year of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune at the Royal Academy schools). The Argenteuil house — a two-storey villa with a small garden by the river — became the centre of an emerging painter-circle that included Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Cézanne, Caillebotte, and (visiting from Paris by train) Manet.

Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872 — Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), 1872. Oil on canvas, 48 × 63 cm. Painted in November 1872 from the window of a hotel room in Monet's home town of Le Havre on the Normandy coast, looking south-east across the inner harbour as the morning sun rose through industrial smoke. The picture was shown at the first independent exhibition of the painter-circle in April 1874 in the photographer Nadar's studio on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The critic Louis Leroy used the title in a sarcastic review for the newspaper Le Charivari — "Impression, Sunrise. Impression — I was sure of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it." The name stuck. The painter-circle, which had until then been variously called the Batignolles School or the Independents, became "the Impressionists" within four months.

In April 1874 the painter-circle organised the first of what would become eight independent exhibitions, opening in the studio of the photographer Nadar on the Boulevard des Capucines. The exhibition was a financial disaster — twenty-nine artists, two hundred works, a total of about 3,500 visitors over a month, no major sale. But it was the moment of the movement's naming. The critic Louis Leroy, reviewing the show for the comic-political newspaper Le Charivari, picked up one of Monet's submitted titles — Impression, Sunrise, a small canvas painted in November 1872 from a hotel window in Le Havre — and used it sarcastically as the headline of his entire dismissal of the exhibition. The painter-circle, which had until then been variously called the Batignolles School or the Independents or the Realists or simply the Refusés, became "the Impressionists" within four months. Manet, characteristically, did not exhibit with them. He believed the Salon was the only public an ambitious painter could afford to ignore. He continued to submit to it (and to be rejected by it) for the rest of his life.

The summer of 1874: Manet at Argenteuil painting Monet painting

In July 1874, the summer after the first Impressionist exhibition, Manet rented a villa at Gennevilliers, the village directly across the Seine from Argenteuil, and spent two months working alongside Monet and Renoir. The summer of 1874 is the single best-documented moment of contact between the two friends. Manet painted Monet at least four times — Monet in a small studio-boat moored at the riverbank, painting plein-air in the boat's cabin; Monet's wife Camille in a hammock in the Argenteuil garden; Monet's wife and son Jean on a bank of the Seine; the Monet family at lunch in the garden. Renoir, who was also at Argenteuil that summer, painted the same scenes from slightly different angles — there is a famous near-identical pair of paintings of Monet's wife and son under a tree on a Sunday afternoon, one by Manet (now in a New York collection) and one by Renoir (now in Washington), painted within an hour of each other on July 1874.

Claude Monet, Camille on the Beach at Trouville, 1870. Oil on canvas, 38 × 46 cm. Painted on Monet's honeymoon at the Normandy seaside resort of Trouville, four years before the Argenteuil summer. The painting shows Monet's first wife Camille Doncieux seated on the beach in a black dress and white parasol with a second figure (probably Camille's mother) seated to the right. The painting is small, rapidly worked, and shows sand grains stuck to the wet paint of the foreground — evidence of plein-air working in the literal sense. Camille died of tuberculosis in 1879 at thirty-two; Monet would marry his second wife Alice Hoschedé in 1892. Manet painted the same Camille at Argenteuil in the summer of 1874.

The exchange was not one-directional. Monet's style affected Manet that summer in ways that are visible in every subsequent Manet canvas: the brushwork loosened, the palette brightened, the contemporary-Paris subjects of the 1860s gave way to garden scenes and river views. Manet's Boating of 1874 — a man in a striped shirt with his hand on a tiller, a woman beside him in white — borrows directly from Monet's Argenteuil river paintings of the early 1870s. Monet's effect on Manet may be a matter of speed (Manet adopted the rapid plein-air technique of the Impressionists) and palette (the cool greys and blacks of the 1863-65 Paris canvases were replaced by the brighter pinks, blues, and greens of Argenteuil). What Manet gave Monet was probably less technical and more structural: the confidence to make contemporary Paris life the explicit subject of major painting, the strategic willingness to absorb scandal as a career asset, and (in the long run) an example of how to outlive the early notoriety into the establishment without compromising the work.

Manet's last painting: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882

Manet died in April 1883 at the age of fifty-one. He had been ill for several years with tabes dorsalis, a degenerative neurological complication of an untreated syphilis infection contracted in his early twenties; by 1880 he could no longer walk reliably and was confined for long periods to his studio on the rue d'Amsterdam in Paris. His left foot was amputated in April 1883 in an attempt to halt the spread of gangrene; he died on the operating table eleven days later. The last major painting he completed before the amputation — A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, finished in early 1882 — is now considered, in collective art-historical consensus, the most consequential picture of his career and one of the canonical paintings of the entire nineteenth century.

Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 — Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Un bar aux Folies Bergère), 1881-82. Oil on canvas, 96 × 130 cm. Held in a London collection. Manet's last major painting, finished a year before his death. The picture shows the barmaid Suzon, a real employee of the Folies-Bergère music-hall in Paris, standing behind a marble-topped counter loaded with champagne bottles, ales, oranges, and roses. Behind her the entire vast mirrored interior of the music-hall is reflected — the crowded gallery boxes, the trapeze artist's swinging legs visible at the upper left, the chandeliers, the spectators. The reflection in the mirror, however, does not match the painted scene: the barmaid's reflected back is shifted to the right, and the man she is serving (visible at the upper right of the mirror) is positioned where, in conventional Renaissance perspective, the viewer of the painting should be.

Monet visited Manet in the studio in the spring of 1883 — Manet was by then bedridden, unable to paint, and reading aloud to himself from Mallarmé's poems. Monet sent yellow chrysanthemums every two days for the last six weeks of Manet's life. Monet was forty-two when Manet died; he would live another forty-three years, almost the entire duration of his late career still ahead of him. The years from 1883 forward — Monet's series projects (Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, the Garden at Giverny, the Water Lilies, the Orangerie cycle) — were carried out entirely without Manet's correction. The painter-circle of the Café Guerbois years had, by 1883, dispersed: Pissarro had moved to Éragny, Cézanne had returned to Aix-en-Provence, Renoir was painting on the Italian Riviera, Caillebotte was sailing on the Seine. Monet became the senior surviving member of the original Impressionist group.

What each one gave the other, and why the names are still confused

The confusion of "Manet" and "Monet" is not arbitrary. The two names share five of six letters, both begin with M and end with -net, and both painters were widely advertised in Paris from the late 1860s to the late 1880s. By the 1890s — Manet by then dead, Monet at the height of his career — the press routinely conflated them in print. The biographical critic Théodore Duret, writing in 1894, complained in print that he had been forced to correct the same misattribution three times in three different reviews of the same season's exhibitions. Today the confusion has stabilised into a permanent pedagogical fact: every introductory survey of modern painting opens with a paragraph distinguishing the two, and every secondary-school art teacher has a mnemonic for telling them apart.

Monet, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875 — Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol — Madame Monet and Her Son (La Promenade), 1875. Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Held in a Washington collection. Camille Monet stands on a slight rise in the meadow above the Argenteuil house with her son Jean (then seven years old) standing in the foreground behind her. The picture was painted the summer after the Manet-Monet-Renoir Argenteuil months and is one of the canonical works of Monet's 1870s middle period. The technique — broken brushwork, high-key colour, the white parasol modelled almost entirely in pale violets and pinks — is the matured Impressionism that the parallel Manet of the same years was beginning to absorb back into his own work.

The simplest distinction is biographical. Manet was older, urban, Parisian, the son of a senior magistrate, and worked almost his entire career in studios within central Paris. His subjects were the contemporary urban life of the Second Empire: bars, theatres, racecourses, music-halls, the boulevards. Monet was younger, provincial, the son of a wholesale grocer from Le Havre, and worked almost his entire career outdoors in the small towns of the lower Seine and the Normandy coast. His subjects were the landscape and weather of the same Île-de-France: poplars, haystacks, cathedrals at different times of day, water lilies. Manet died at fifty-one in 1883; Monet died at eighty-six in 1926. Manet refused on principle to exhibit with the Impressionists; Monet was the founding member of the group. The Salon was Manet's permanent battleground; the Impressionist exhibitions were Monet's. They were friends across this exact divide for eighteen years, and the painting each of them did in those years — particularly the summer of 1874 at Argenteuil — bears the mark of the other.

Key takeaways

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) are two distinct painters. They met at the 1865 Salon de Paris when Manet, infuriated by the scandal around his Olympia, noticed the seascape hanging beside it was signed with a name almost identical to his own. The seascape was by an unknown twenty-four-year-old Claude Monet. Manet at first believed the signature was a deliberate provocation.
Manet's 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was the central scandal of the parallel Salon des Refusés authorised by Napoleon III; his 1865 Olympia was the scandal of the official Salon. The two pictures together broke the academic conventions of the European nude. Manet was already, by the time of the Olympia incident, the most controversial young painter in Paris.
By 1872 Manet and Monet were friends. The painter Carolus-Duran brokered the introduction at the Café Guerbois on the Boulevard des Batignolles, where the painter-circle of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Cézanne, and Caillebotte met weekly through the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) was the painting that gave the movement its name. The critic Louis Leroy, reviewing the first independent painter-circle exhibition in April 1874 for Le Charivari, picked the title sarcastically; the painter-circle was "the Impressionists" within four months. Manet refused on principle to exhibit with the group — he believed the Salon was the only public an ambitious painter could ignore.
The summer of 1874 was the single best-documented moment of contact between Manet and Monet. Manet rented a villa at Gennevilliers across the Seine from Argenteuil and painted Monet, Camille Monet, Renoir, and the Monet family at least four times. Monet's brushwork and palette permanently affected Manet's late style; Manet's contemporary-life Paris subjects affected Monet less, but his strategic confidence and willingness to absorb scandal influenced Monet's later career management.
Manet died at fifty-one in April 1883 of complications from an untreated syphilis infection. His last major painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), is now considered the most consequential picture of his career. Monet was a pallbearer at his funeral. Monet survived Manet by forty-three years and carried out his entire major series-project career (Haystacks, Poplars, Rouen Cathedral, Garden at Giverny, Water Lilies, the Orangerie cycle) after Manet's death.
The names "Manet" and "Monet" share five of six letters and have been routinely confused in print since the 1890s. The simplest distinction is biographical: Manet was older, urban, Parisian, a senior magistrate's son painting Paris music-halls and theatres; Monet was younger, provincial, a Le Havre grocer's son painting outdoors in the small towns of the lower Seine and at his Giverny garden. Manet refused the Impressionist exhibitions; Monet founded them.