ALL painters must start somewhere, but Édouard Manet found a particularly unusual route into his career. As a young man, his father ignored his wish to become an artist and forced him to join the merchant marine as a first step to becoming a naval officer. On a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the sailors noticed that their cargo of Dutch cheeses had been damaged by seawater. ‘The rinds had become bleached, and that was a worry,’ Manet later recalled. ‘I volunteered to put matters right and, conscientiously, with a shaving brush, I touched up the pale corpses.’ This bit of sleight of hand, he said, ‘was my beginning as a painter’.
Fortuitously—one wonders how hard he tried—Manet failed his naval exams and swapped the shaving brush for the paintbrush, but he never became shy of the unorthodox. After Manet’s death, with a penchant for yellow trousers; and a mentor to the younger rebels of the Impressionist circle. If he wanted acceptance, he had a strange way of going about it.