people on the boulevard
did not turn to look at him. "The most notorious painter in Paris" was
a description which he finally grew to enjoy. It may not be denied
that he painted several pictures as a direct challenge to the world,
but a painter of offensive pictures he never was. The execrated
Picnic, proscribed by the jury of the Salon in 1861, was shown in the
Salon des Refuses (in company with works by Bracquemond, Cazin,
Fantin-Latour, Harpignies, Jongkind, J.P. Laurens, Legros, Pissarro,
Vollon, Whistler--the mildest-mannered crew of pirates that ever
attempted to scuttle the bark of art), and a howl arose. What was this
shocking canvas like? A group of people at a picnic, several nudes
among them. In vain it was pointed out to the modest Parisians (who at
the time revelled in the Odalisque of Ingres, in Cabanel, Gerome,
Bouguereau, and other delineators of the chaste) that in the Louvre
the Concert of Giorgione depicted just such a scene; but the mixture
of dressed and undressed was appalling, and Manet became a man marked
for vengeance. Perhaps the exceeding brilliancy of his paint and his
unconventional manner of putting it on his canvas had as much to do
with the obloquy as his theme. And then he would paint the life around
him instead of producing _pastiches_ of old masters or sickly
evocations of an unreal past.

He finished Olympia the year of his marriage, and refused to exhibit
it; Baudelaire insisted to the contrary. It was shown at the Salon of
1865 (where Monet exhibited for the first time) and became the scandal
of the day. Again the painter was bombarded with invectives. This
awful nude, to be sure, was no more unclothed than is Cabanel's Venus,
but the latter is pretty and painted with soap-suds and
sentimentality. The Venus of Titian is not a whit more exposed than
the slim, bony, young woman who has just awakened in time to receive a
bouquet at the hands of her negress, while a black cat looks on this
matutinal proceeding as a matter of course. The silhouette has the
firmness of Holbein; the meagre girl recalls a Cranach. It is not the
greatest of Manet; one could say, despite the bravura of the
performances, that the painter was indulging in an ironic joke. It was
a paint pot flung in the face of Paris. Olympia figured at the 1887
exhibition in the Pavilion Manet. An American (the late William M.
Laffan) tried to buy her. John Sargent intervened, and a number of the
painter's friends, headed by C