Manet vs Monet: How to Tell Them Apart in 5 Seconds

Manet vs Monet comes down to one question: is the picture about a person, or about the light? Édouard Manet (1832–1883) painted Parisians in flat color and real black paint. Claude Monet (1840–1926) painted sunlight on water and gardens in quick strokes laid side by side. Person first, Manet. Light first, Monet.

Five checks, one second each, sort most paintings by either man. The exceptions, and the story of how the two became friends, come after them.

The 5-second test

Go in order and stop at the first clear answer.

1. Second 1: find the person. Manet built his pictures around a human being, who often looks straight back at you. The nude in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) stares directly at the viewer, and Olympia's gaze shocked the Salon of 1865. Monet's subject is the place and the weather over it.
2. Second 2: look for true black. Manet never gave up black as a color; he even painted a black cat into Olympia. The Impressionists avoided black and mixed their darks from other colors, and outdoors their shadows often take the blue of the sky.
3. Second 3: check an edge. Manet's figures sit in flat, opaque patches of paint, often outlined in black. Monet breaks edges into short, thick strokes set side by side with as little mixing as possible. Up close, a Monet falls apart into dabs.
4. Second 4: ask what time it is. If you can guess the hour or the weather, lean Monet. Impression, Sunrise (1872) is a red sun rising over the port of Le Havre. In 1881 he painted his sunflower garden at Vétheuil four times, and the version now in Los Angeles has almost no shadow under the summer sun.
5. Second 5: read the date. Manet died on April 30, 1883, so a label reading 1884 or later rules him out. Monet painted until 1926, and all of his roughly 250 canvases of the lily pond came after Manet's death.

To train your eye, run the five checks on every thumbnail in a page of Monet paintings, then on a museum page of Manet's portraits.

Where the differences come from

Most of the differences follow from one choice: Manet kept sending his work to the official Salon, while Monet showed with the independent group that took its name from one of his paintings.

The market picks Monet: his haystack painting Meules sold for $110.7 million in May 2019, while Manet's record at the time, Le Printemps in November 2014, was a $65.1 million sale at Christie's.

One station, two painters

The year 1874 shows the split. Manet sent The Railway to the official Salon. His favorite model, Victorine Meurent, sits at an iron fence near the Gare Saint-Lazare while a little girl watches through the railings, her back to you. The train itself is only a white cloud of steam. Critics found the subject baffling and the execution sketchy. That April, the first Impressionist exhibition opened in the photographer Nadar's studio with Monet's Impression, Sunrise on the wall; it now hangs in the Paris museum that holds the largest collection of his paintings in the world, the Marmottan.

Three years later Monet went inside the station. He painted the Gare Saint-Lazare twelve times in 1877, the smoky interior under changing skies, and hung seven of those canvases at the third Impressionist exhibition. Check one settles it: Manet painted a woman near a railway, and Monet painted the steam and the light.

When the test fails

Monet painted people too

In his twenties Monet chased Salon success with big figure paintings. His 1866 picture of women in white dresses is more than two and a half meters tall; he painted it outdoors, lowering the canvas into a trench to reach the top, with Camille Doncieux posing for the figures. The Salon rejected it in 1867. Look at what it's really about, though: light and shade on white dresses. It's in the Musée d'Orsay.

His own Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1865–1866) answered Manet's picnic with twelve people in Parisian fashion, all of them dressed. Damp ruined parts of it while his landlord held it in place of rent, so Monet cut it up; two large fragments are in the Musée d'Orsay. Manet then renamed his own picture in 1867, copying Monet's title. The tell: only Manet's picnic has a nude staring at you.

Even his family's garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867), now at the Met, with his father Adolphe in the foreground, gives itself away. Monet called it "the Chinese painting in which there are flags." The flags got the nickname; his father didn't.

Manet went outdoors in 1874

In July and August 1874 Manet stayed at his family's house in Gennevilliers, across the Seine from Monet at Argenteuil, and painted in the open air beside him. Boating (the Met) and Argenteuil (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai) came out bright, with hard blue water; a reviewer at the 1875 Salon mocked "a river of indigo." Manet still shows through: in both, a couple fills the canvas, and both went to the Salon.

Why was Édouard Manet controversial?

Because he painted nudes as ordinary Parisian women of his own day, in a flat, sketchy manner his critics disliked.

The 1863 Salon jury turned down Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, so Manet showed it at the Salon des Refusés, where a nude woman lunching with fully dressed men offended the public's sense of propriety. Two years later the Salon accepted Olympia and the uproar was bigger. The picture takes its cue from Titian's Venus of Urbino (about 1534), but Manet's woman shows no embarrassment, and in 1860s Paris the name Olympia was linked with prostitutes. Titian's little dog, a symbol of fidelity, became a black cat.

The irony: Manet, a judge's son, wanted success inside the system. He kept submitting to the Salon while his friends ran their own shows.

Did Manet and Monet know each other?

Yes, though it started badly. At the Salon of 1865 works hung alphabetically by artist, so Monet's two large seascapes ended up near Manet's Olympia, and visitors congratulated the wrong man. Manet apparently exclaimed: "Who is this rascal who pastiches my painting so basely?"

The grudge didn't last. Henri Fantin-Latour's A Studio at Les Batignolles (1870, Musée d'Orsay) shows Manet at the easel with Monet half hidden among his friends. In 1871 Manet found the Monets a house at Argenteuil, and on July 23, 1874, he painted Camille Monet and her son Jean on the lawn there, with Monet tending the flowers behind them. The canvas Manet made that day belongs to the Met. Renoir turned up and painted the same pair beside him; his version is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

When Manet died on April 30, 1883, Monet was moving into his house at Giverny. A telegram from Gustave Manet asked him to be one of the six pallbearers, and he had to borrow the train fare and the price of a mourning suit from his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. In 1890 Monet organized the fund (1,000 francs of it his own) that bought Olympia from Manet's widow, Suzanne, for 19,415 francs, so the painting could belong to France. It has been at the Musée d'Orsay since 1986, a short walk from both painters' other paintings everyone ends up asking about.

A Monet for your own wall

If the light won you over, start with the full run of Monet canvases painted by hand in oil. The Le Havre sunrise and the Giverny lily pond are the obvious first picks. And if you liked the exceptions, the women in white dresses make the Monet that almost passes for a Manet, figures and all.

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Monet Family in Their Garden at Argenteuil
• LACMA: Claude Monet, The Artist's Garden, Vétheuil
• The New York Review of Books: "Manet Paints Monet"
• The New York Review of Books: "Suffering, Unfaltering Manet"
• Sotheby's: Monet's Meules sale
• NBC News: Manet's Le Printemps record
• CBS New York: Le Printemps at Christie's