Do you know your Manet from your Monet?

A NEW blockbuster exhibition at London's Royal Academy is devoted to painter Edouard Manet whom many regard as the father of modern art

French painter Edouard Manet was hated by art critics French painter Edouard Manet was hated by art critics

Imagine there's a famous artist called Dominic Horst. While his equally celebrated rival Damien Hirst pickles sharks and directs minions to pour gloss paint on spinning canvases Horst makes headlines when enraged visitors to London's most prestigious art gallery try to take potshots at his work.

That was pretty much how things were in Paris in the late 19th century.

"Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?" complained the artist Edouard Manet. He found out soon enough when people started congratulating him on paintings the other guy had done.

The two men became friends and you can see a picture Manet painted of Claude Monet's family at a new exhibition dedicated to the first painter, the one with the "a", at London's Royal Academy.

But Manet always refused to join the Impressionist movement, named after Monet's revolutionary painting Impression, Sunrise, and declined to join any of the eight Impressionist exhibitions held between 1874 and 1886.

Nine years older than his near namesake Manet was born into a well-to-do Paris family in 1832. His father was a judge while his mother was goddaughter to a member of the Swedish royal family.

Edouard was expected to pursue a career in the law but developed an interest in painting after being taken by his uncle to the Louvre. After twice failing the exam to join the navy he was allowed to pursue an art education, studying under an academic painter and copying Old Masters in the Louvre.

A confirmed city-lover he was a fixture of Parisian café society whose friends included the writers Baudelaire, Zola and Mallarmé, the painters Degas, Pissarro, Renoir and Cézanne and the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau. Biographers have found him a dif-ficult subject because he was constantly seeing his friends face to face and so wrote very few letters.

The biggest question mark in his private life is over the paternity of his wife's son Léon, whom he often painted. Officially the painter's godson, the boy may have been Manet's own son - but he may even have been his brother.

Manet is remembered for his scenes of Parisian leisure and social life

LÉON'S Dutch mother Suzanne Leenhoff arrived at the age of 19 to give piano lessons to the 17-year-old Manet and his younger brother. Three years later she gave birth to Léon, whom she then passed off as her younger brother. She continued to do so throughout her marriage to Manet, which occurred when her son was 11.

It was not the most conventional marriage. Manet's sister-in-law, the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, described Suzanne as fat and Mme Manet played such a lowprofile role in the painter's life that when he told the poet Baudelaire he was getting married his friend had no idea who Suzanne was.

Once they were wed it was Manet's mother who was the hostess for parties at his home and he and Suzanne produced no children once they were husband and wife.

The notion that Manet's father Auguste was also involved with Suzanne and thus may have been Léon's father stems from the fact that Manet waited until his father was dead to marry her, even though their liaison had already been going for several years.

It's possible that neither of the Manets was Léon's father. What we do know is that both father and son died of syphilis. That raises the tantalising possibility that one may have indirectly caught it from the other but the condition was so prevalent at the time (one in seven Frenchmen suffered from it) that it could have been acquired from any form of louche sexual lifestyle.

Despite Manet's privileged background and connections his career was slow to take off. Unlike the Impressionists he was determined to be accepted by the official Paris Salon. When his painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe ("lunch on the grass") was rejected by the Salon it was hung instead in the Salon des Refusés, the "rejects show" set up by Napoleon III. But when the emperor saw the painting he called it an "offence against decency" because it showed a naked woman with two fully clothed men. The writer Zola pointed out there were 50 pictures of naked women and clothed men in the Louvre and this one was only shocking because they were modern-day rather than classical figures. It was to no avail - the Salon des Refusés was shut down for a decade.

When the Salon proper accepted another Manet nude, Olympia, there was a further scandal because the picture was seen as so racy. After the public tried to damage it with their canes it had to be hung out of reach above a door.

MANET did find the acceptance he craved eventually. He won a medal at the Salon in 1881 and was awarded the Légion d'honneur. But by then he was ill, suffering partial paralysis from a condition related to syphilis. His left leg was amputated because of gangrene in 1883 and he died 11 days later, aged 51.

Today he is remembered for his scenes of Parisian leisure and social life: a barmaid at the Folies-Bergère, a concert in the Tuileries gardens, horse-racing at Longchamps.

They are not outrageous to modern eyes but in his own time the banality of these scenes was shocking in itself, particularly when the painter introduced recognisable faces into depictions of everyday life. This kind of thing hadn't been done before.

One painting in the RA show, The Railway, above, particularly upset the detractors. It shows one of Manet's most familiar sitters, the model he used in Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, sitting in front of some railings at the Gare Saint Lazare. Beside her, with her back to the painter, is a little girl in a blue dress looking at a huge cloud of steam, which is the only evidence of a train passing behind them.

"Is Manet's Railway a double portrait or a subject picture?" complained one critic. "We lack information to solve this problem." To us, used to the camera framing objects and people from all kinds of peculiar angles, it's baffling that anyone would consider this a "problem" at all.

Yet standing in front of it yesterday morning I did find myself muddled. I looked at the woman, then the girl and then at the train behind and I found that my eye was bewildered, not certain which bit of the picture it was meant to focus on. That kind of discombobulation is part of the point of modern art, gently messing with our perceptions and preconceptions.

The fact that Manet can still do that 140 years after the picture was painted isn't a bad epitaph.

• Manet: Portraying Life is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from January 26 to April 14.

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