Paul Gauguin

Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863) is a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose is based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538).

As he had in Luncheon on the Grass (1863), Manet had again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist.

The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting The Nude Maja (1800).

Manet had embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display.

His uniquely frank depiction of a self-assured prostitute is accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865, where it created a scandal.

According to Antonin Proust, "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" by offended viewers. (Manet by Gilles Neret (2003; Taschen).

The painting is controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuate her nakedness, sexuality, and comfortable courtesan lifestyle.

The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers are all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time.

This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankles viewers.

The painting's flatness, inspired by Japanese wood block art, serves to make the nude more human and less voluptuous.

A fully dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the theory, current at this time, that black people are hyper-sexed.

That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

Olympia's body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational.

She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors.

Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

A contemporary critic denounces Olympia's "shamelessly flexed" left hand, which seemed to him a mockery of the relaxed, shielding hand of Titian's Venus. (Hunter, Dianne. Seduction and theory: readings of gender, representation, and rhetoric. University of Illinois Press, 1989. p. 19.)

Likewise, the alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino.

"Olympia" is the subject of caricatures in the popular press, but is championed by the French avant-garde community, and the painting's significance is appreciated by artists such as Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and later Paul Gauguin.

As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raises the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society.

The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works is seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copies or uses as source material.

His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint.

He becomes friends with the painters—later to be known as Impressionists—Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro through another painter, Berthe Morisot, who is a member of the group and draws him into their activities.

The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Morisot had had her first painting accepted in the Salon de Paris in 1864, and she will continue to show in the salon for the next ten years.

Edgar Degas, dependent for the first time in his life on sales of his artwork for income, will produce much of his greatest work during the decade beginning in 1874.

By now thoroughly disenchanted with the Salon, Degas joins forces with a group of young artists who are intent upon organizing an independent exhibiting society.

Degas’s father had died earlier in the year, and in the subsequent settling of the estate it had been discovered that Degas's brother René has amassed enormous business debts.

To preserve the family name, Degas has been forced to sell his house and a collection of art he had inherited.

Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, most of whose works have been consistently rejected by the juries of the official Salon of the French Academy (the state-sponsored annual exhibition), decide to hold their own exhibit.

These founding members of the nascent Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs are joined by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Eugène Boudin.

The celebrated photographer Nadar, whose former studio building at 35 boulevard des Capucines has become a local landmark and a favorite meeting place of the intelligentsia of Paris, lends them his gallery.

On April 15, 1874, the nine painters offer their work for public viewing.

The exhibition itself reveals three main trends.

The Parisian circle around Monet and Renoir has developed the evanescent and sketchlike style the furthest.

The vision of those working near Pissarro in Pontoise and Auvers is in general more solid, being firmly rooted in country scenes.

A relatively urbane, genre-like trend is detectable in Degas's picture of Paul Valpinçon and his family at the races called Carriage at the Races (1870-1873; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Morisot's The Cradle (1873; Louvre, Paris).

Cézanne, modeling himself on Pissarro, sublimates the turbulent emotions of his earlier work in pictures that are studied directly and closely from nature. (He will follow the method for the rest of his life.)

Although some critics appreciate the new painting, most subject the artists to ridicule.

Cézanne sells one of the two landscapes he shows but arouses derision with a third painting, his Modern Olympia (1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

The work of Renoir, who has mastered the ability to convey his immediate visual impressions, is a perfect illustration of the Impressionists' new approach in thought and technique.

By using small, multicolored strokes, he evokes the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman's skin in the outdoors.

The six paintings he exhibits show great vitality, emphasizing the pleasures of life despite the financial worries that trouble him. (Finding himself unable to obtain five hundred francs for his La Loge (The Theater Box, 1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London), exhibited at Nadar's, for which his brother and a new model, Nini, had posed, he eventually pressures grumbling Martin pere into paying four hundred and twenty-five for it, the amount he desperately needs for his rent.) (John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th rev. ed. 1973, reprinted 1980)

Monet exhibits twelve paintings: his Impression: Sunrise (1872; Musée Marmottan, Paris) prompts the journalist Louis Leroy, writing in the satirical magazine Le Charivari, to dismiss the show as an exhibition of the Impressionist.

Leroy thus unintentionally gives a name to the new artistic movement, as the artists themselves soon adopt the name as descriptive of their intention to accurately convey visual impressions. (The 1874 paintings by these Impressionists will eventually lead to what is now recognized as Modern Art.)

Nadar, a natural showman, is greatly pleased by the storm the exhibit raises; the notoriety is good for business.

Paul Gauguin had seen the first Impressionist exhibition, which had completely entranced him and confirmed his desire to become a painter.

He spends some seventeen thousand francs on works by Manet, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, Renoir and Guillaumin.

Pissarro takes a special interest in his attempts at painting, emphasizing that he should “look for the nature that suits your temperament”.

The twenty-seven-year-old Gauguin begins to study under the supportive older artist, at first struggling to master the techniques of painting and drawing.

The orphaned son of a French journalist and a Peruvian Creole, whose mother had been a writer and a follower of Saint-Simon, had been first aroused by his mother’s very rich lover, businessman Gustave Arosa, and by a fellow stockbroker, Émile Schuffenecker, with whom he had begun painting.

The collection of Arosa, who had become the Gauguin family's legal guardian, includes the work of Camille Corot, Eugéne Delacroix, and Jean-François Millet.

Upon Gauguin's release from the merchant marine in 1872, Arosa had secured a position for him as a stockbroker and introduced him to the Danish woman Mette Sophie Gad, whom Gauguin had married the following year.)

Gauguin had soon begun to receive artistic instruction and to frequent a studio where he could draw from a model.

Paul Gauguin's Landscape at Viroflay (Paysage de Viroflay) painted in the style of Camille Pissarro, is accepted for the official Salon of 1876.

In the meantime, Pissarro had introduced him to Paul Cézanne, for whose works he conceives a great respect—so much so that the older man begins to fear that Gauguin will steal his `sensations'.

All three work together for some time at Pontoise, where Pissarro and Gauguin draw pencil sketches of each other (Cabinet des Dessins, Louvre).

Gustave Moreau's increasing use of dramatic lighting intensifies the brilliant, jewel-like colors of his palette.

The Apparition (Dance of Salome) (c. 1876; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Dance of Salome (c. 1876; Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris) show the Symbolist painter's richly crowded canvases becoming increasingly concerned with exotic eroticism and violence.

Gustave Caillebotte backs the fourth Impressionist exhibition in Paris, held at 98 avenue de l'Opéra with fifteen participants.

At Edgar Degas's request, Mary Cassatt is an exhibitor.

Camille Pissarro exhibits thirty-eight works.

Paul Gauguin, invited by Pissarro to submit to the group show, exhibits one sculpture and seven paintings.

Pissarro works with Gauguin at Pontoise during the summer.

Berthe Morisot does not exhibit this time and spends the summer in Beuzeval-Houlgate.