In the Conservatory

~The earliest known works by Manet are copies after the masters—certainly an acceptable and appropriate beginning for an aspiring young artist. A great many of his copies must have disappeared, but what remains attests to Couture’s guidance toward masters of painterly technique : Titian, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Velasquez...

~The Garden was not a Salon painting. The only white dress to show up in Manet’s next Salon was worn by a child, in The Railway (fig. 95). In the Salon of 1874, Manet showed this painting and a little watercolor of Punchinello with a poem...

James McCabe, the American visitor, was convinced that Louis Napoleon had enacted Meryon’s “Loi Solaire.” His account of Second Empire Paris is especially revealing when placed alongside Henry Tuckerman’s. Tuckerman saw through the sheen of imperial splendor to the authoritarian power it disguised....