Who Is More Famous, Manet or Monet? The Numbers and the History

Monet. If you want to know who is more famous, Manet or Monet, the answer today is Claude Monet, and it isn't especially close. He pulls bigger crowds, he fetches higher prices, and one of his paintings gave the whole movement its name. Édouard Manet wins a different contest. Art historians tend to rank him as the more important painter, the one who broke the rules first and took the beating for it.

Both things are true at once, and the numbers show where the line falls. Monet's pond and haystacks are the images people want on a wall at home, which is why so many Monet paintings get copied by hand. Manet's best pictures are the ones in the textbooks. (If your problem is simpler and you keep mixing the two up in a gallery, there's a five-second way to tell their canvases apart. This piece is about reputation.)

Two retrospectives, one Paris season

The cleanest test happened almost by accident. In the autumn of 2010 the Grand Palais in Paris opened a huge Monet retrospective. A few months after it closed, the Musée d'Orsay opened its own big Manet show. Same city, same public, nearly the same year.

The Monet show ran from 22 September 2010 to 24 January 2011 and drew 913,064 visitors in four months. Near the end the Grand Palais stayed open around the clock for four days and three nights, and 8,800 people came through on the last all-nighter alone. Some had queued for six hours. No exhibition in France had drawn that many people in more than forty years.

The Manet retrospective opened on 5 April 2011 and closed on 17 July. It finished with 470,268 visitors. For any museum that's a very good number. It's also roughly half of Monet's.

Manet's best recent crowd came when he shared the bill. The Orsay's 2023 pairing with Degas drew 669,160 people over 102 days, the third-best exhibition attendance since the museum opened. When the same show moved to the Met in New York that autumn, another 351,000 saw it. Strong results, but half the pull on those posters belonged to Degas.

What the auction rooms say

On 14 May 2019 one of Monet's haystack paintings, Meules, painted in 1890, came up at Sotheby's in New York. Six bidders fought over it for eight minutes. It sold for $110,747,000, a record for Monet and for any Impressionist work. The last time it had changed hands at auction was 1986, and the 2019 price was more than 44 times higher. The painting had a good story, too: Bertha Honoré Palmer of Chicago bought it in 1892 straight from Monet's dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel.

Manet's record is lower. In November 2014 a Manet portrait fetched $65.1 million at Christie's in New York, against an estimate that topped out at $35 million. The picture was Spring, painted in 1881, a portrait of the actress Jeanne Demarsy dressed as the season. The price nearly doubled his previous record of $33.2 million, set in 2010. The buyer was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

So Monet leads by a wide margin. But read the gap carefully. Spring was the last of Manet's Salon paintings still in private hands, which tells you how few major Manets are left to sell. He died in 1883, barely past fifty. Monet lived until 1926 and painted the same subjects again and again, haystacks and water lilies above all, so far more of his work exists and far more of it circulates.

Why the public picked Monet

At 7:35 in the morning on 13 November 1872, Monet sat at a hotel window above the outer harbor at Le Havre and painted the sun coming up through the fog, in one sitting. He called it the foggy harbor view he titled Impression, Sunrise.

It went on show on 15 April 1874 in the photographer Nadar's former studio, and it was mocked. On 25 April the critic Louis Leroy wrote: "An impression, I'm sure. I thought to myself, this has made an impression on me so there must be impressions somewhere in there." His joke named the movement. The painting sold that May for 800 francs and was resold four years later for 210. Nobody at the time thought they were holding the most famous seascape in France.

That's Monet's first advantage: every time someone says "Impressionism," they're quoting a title of his. It's also the reason he's so often called the father of the movement.

His second advantage was time. Monet had four decades after Manet's death to keep working, and he spent the last stretch of it in his garden at Giverny, painting the pond full of water lilies over and over. The house and gardens are now the second most visited tourist attraction in Normandy. People travel there to stand inside his paintings.

The third is that his work stayed together. The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris received Impression, Sunrise in 1940. In 1966 it inherited the painter's estate through his son Michel, including the Giverny house and more than a hundred canvases, which made it home to the largest Monet collection anywhere. A whole museum you can visit for one painter is a fame engine Manet never had.

And Monet is easy to love on first sight. Even his early work, like the white summer dresses of Women in the Garden or that windy seaside terrace full of flags, asks nothing of you. You look, and it's pleasant. That matters more for popularity than any critic's opinion.

Why historians put Manet first

Manet made people angry, and that was the point. Olympia, dated 1863, caused a scandal at the Salon of 1865: a naked woman staring straight at the viewer, with no goddess story to hide behind. He took Titian's Venus and turned her into someone you might meet in Paris. Critics were horrified. Painters took notes.

He also never fully joined the club. Manet wanted his victories at the official Salon, and he didn't consider himself an Impressionist, even though he was close to the painters who did. Spring was shown at the 1882 Salon next to A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and it went down well with the critics, one of the few clean wins of his career.

When the Getty bought Spring in 2014, its director, Timothy Potts, described Manet as late nineteenth-century French painting's "greatest and most influential master." That's the scholarly consensus in a sentence, and it's why Manet gets the bigger chapter in art history books even though Monet sells more posters.

The strongest evidence for Manet's standing comes from Monet himself. Seven years after Manet died, in 1890, Monet launched a public subscription to buy Olympia and give it to the French state. It's the reason the painting now belongs to the nation and hangs at the Orsay. The more famous painter spent his own time and reputation making sure the braver one wasn't forgotten.

Who came first, Manet or Monet?

Manet, by eight years. He was born in 1832 and Monet in 1840. By the time the younger man was finding his way, Manet was already the most talked-about painter in Paris, which goes some way to explaining the respect. Manet died in 1883. Monet outlived him by 43 years.

Was Manet in love with Berthe Morisot?

Nobody can prove it either way, and the paintings are the only real evidence. Morisot, a painter herself, first appears in his work in 1869, and he kept coming back to her. His 1872 portrait of her in black, holding a small bunch of violets, is one of his best. He lit her hard from the side so her face is all light and shadow, and he painted her eyes black, though they were green. A few months later she married one of his brothers. Paul Valéry later wrote that he ranked nothing in Manet's work higher than that portrait. Read into it what you like.

Fame and influence are different prizes

If "famous" means recognized by the most people, Monet wins every measure you can check: attendance, auction price, a museum of his own, a garden people fly across the world to see. If it means the painter other painters had to answer to, Manet wins, and Monet would have agreed. He raised the money for Olympia.

Both men sit comfortably among the paintings people recognize on sight. You just recognize them for different reasons: Monet for how his pictures feel, Manet for what his pictures dared.

Living with a Monet

If Monet is the one you'd rather see every morning, Art & See's painters copy his canvases by hand in oil, from the Le Havre sunrise to the lily pond at Giverny. You can look through the rest of his work in the collection and pick the view that suits your room.

Sources

• Le Journal des Arts, Monet at the Grand Palais
• Le Journal des Arts, Manet at the Orsay, 2011
• Musée d'Orsay press room, Manet/Degas attendance
• Sotheby's, Monet's Meules sale
• Getty Museum, acquisition of Manet's Spring
• Musée Marmottan Monet, the Monet collection
• Fondation Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
• Musée d'Orsay on Google Arts & Culture, Olympia