Edouard Manet, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)

In 1983, the centennial of Edouard Manet’s death was commemorated by an ambitious retrospective jointly organized by two brilliant scholars: the late, much missed, Françoise Cachin, the first director of the Musée d’Orsay, and Charles S. Moffett, then the curator of the Department of European Paintings of the Metropolitan Museum. The version of the exhibition seen at the Metropolitan, after an initial showing at the Grand Palais, Paris, was a stunning comprehensive assembly of an astonishing number of Manet’s most achieved paintings, along with less familiar important works, a range of studies, drawings, prints, and a sampling of his lively, illustrated letters.

There were, of course, some conspicuous gaps. Not surprisingly, given the perils of moving large canvases across the Atlantic, neither of Manet’s early iconic works, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863), both in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, came to New York, nor did the National Gallery, Washington’s “frieze” of picturesque characters, The Old Musician (1862), which, as part of the Chester Dale Collection, cannot travel. But even absent these crucial works, we could revel, at the Met, in a close-to-ideal roster of Manet’s most potent paintings, assembled from collections around the world—everything from the early, old-master-inspired nude, Surprised Nymph (1859–61, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires) to the enigmatic late masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881–82, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London).

The catalogue