The Ham - Edouard Manet

Edouard Manet

Guards had to be stationed around Olympia to prevent physical attack. The painting, exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, depicts a prostitute staring directly at the viewer, attended by a Black servant holding flowers from a client. The journalist Antonin Proust recalled that only administrative precautions saved the canvas from being destroyed. Two years earlier, Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, rejected by the official Salon and shown at the Salon des Refuses, had caused a similar fury: a naked woman among fully clothed men at a picnic. Manet was born in 1832 into wealth. His father was a high court judge. His mother was the daughter of a diplomat and goddaughter of the Swedish Crown Prince, from whom all subsequent Swedish monarchs descend. The family wanted him to study law. He refused. As a compromise, he attempted the naval college entrance exam. Failed. Was sent on a merchant ship to Rio de Janeiro. Took the exam again on return. Failed again. His father finally relented and let him study art. He repeatedly refused invitations to exhibit with the Impressionists, insisting that the official Salon was where serious artists should show their work. This despite the fact that his own paintings had done more to provoke the movement into existence than any other single body of work. Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro acknowledged the debt. He kept his distance anyway. He contracted syphilis. By 1879 he was receiving hydrotherapy treatments, believing the problem was circulatory. The actual diagnosis was locomotor ataxia, a late-stage syphilis complication. His left foot was amputated in April 1883 due to gangrene. He died eleven days later, aged fifty-one.