This book offers a unique opportunity to grasp the essential unity of the art and life of Edouard Manet, recognised as the most important avant-garde artist of his generation and the leader of the group which became known as the Impressionists. While Manet's critics called him inconsistent, he himself saw the great diversity of his art as its greatest strength, since it reflected the spontaneity and force of his responses to the world about him.
He was well aware of the radical nature of his art and always insisted it had to be seen whole. His earliest letters, written to his parents before he became an art student, already betray his acute powers of observation as well as his commitment to radical, liberal views which were to be one of the driving forces in the art of this elegant bourgeois.
The 240 superb colour reproductions here include all the artist's most famous paintings, from the early Salon pictures which caused such public outcry to his last great masterpiece, the 'Bar At The Folies-Bergere', at the Salon of 1882.
