Question

Manet’s contemporaries included Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot. How did Manet and his contemporaries get along and what did they have in common?

Answer 1

Short answer: they were friends, rivals, collaborators and mutual influences more than a single “school.” Manet occupied a pivotal, ambivalent position: he was an older, decisive influence on the younger painters who became the Impressionists, he socialized and worked with many of them, and he shared with them a new set of subjects and pictorial concerns — but he never fully joined the Impressionist group and often kept his independence.

How they got along
- Friendship and mutual respect: Manet had close personal and artistic friendships with several of them. He was especially close to Berthe Morisot (she married his brother Eugène and Manet painted her repeatedly), and he regularly socialized with Degas, Monet, and Renoir. They exchanged ideas, sat for one another, copied or commented on each other’s work, and sometimes showed together at salons or in private viewings.
- Rivalry and tension: relations were not always smooth. Degas and Manet admired each other but also quarrelled at times; Manet’s refusal to join the Impressionist exhibitions and his continued reliance on the Salon and older compositional models caused some distance with painters like Monet and Renoir, who organized independent exhibitions. Artistic differences (approach to plein air work, composition, finish, and subject choice) produced frank disagreements as well as stimulus.
- Collaboration and social networks: they formed overlapping networks of models, collectors, dealers (e.g., Durand‑Ruel, Caillebotte’s patronage), and cafés/studios where ideas circulated. Degas and Manet, for example, often drew together; Morisot’s participation in the Impressionist exhibitions connected Manet indirectly to that group.

What they had in common
- Modern subjects: all were interested in contemporary life — cafés, theaters, suburban leisure, domestic interiors, workers and middle‑class life — instead of history, myth, or grand academic subjects.
- Rejection of academic orthodoxy: they challenged official academic conventions of subject, composition, and highly finished technique (Manet did it in his own way; Monet, Renoir and others pushed further toward plein air light studies).
- New pictorial approaches: looser brushwork, brighter palette, attention to transient effects of light and atmosphere (especially Monet and Renoir), flatter areas of color and sketch‑like handling that emphasized painting as a modern visual experience.
- Exchange of techniques and ideas: they influenced one another’s handling of paint, composition, and subject matter. Manet’s bold subject choices and freer brushwork were an important precedent for the younger painters; conversely, their experiments with color and optical effects fed back into the circle.
- Shared historical context: the churn of mid‑19th century Paris (Haussmannization, cafés and leisure culture, the Salon/Salon des Refusés debates, the Franco‑Prussian War/Commune) gave them common material and a public that often reacted strongly to their work.

In short: Manet was a mentor and catalyst for many of the Impressionists while remaining somewhat apart from their formal group. Personal warmth, professional rivalry, and fertile artistic exchange characterized their relationships, and they shared a commitment to depicting modern life with new painterly means.