Edouard Manet is regarded as one of the main representatives of modern French painting shortly after the middle of the 19th century and as a pioneer of the Impressionism. His pictures of modern life were mostly rejected by the Salon. In the first half of the 1870s, he closely associated himself with the painters around Claude Monet with whom he met both in Parisian cafés and in Argenteuil. Although Manet's painting in this phase shows the Impressionist brushstroke, he refused to take part in Impressionist exhibitions. Instead, his goal throughout his life was to assert himself and his painting, which was considered anti-academic, at the Salon (→ Edouard Manet, the Salon and the double gaze).
His role portraits of his model Victorine Meurent, created between 1862 and 1873, are programmatic paintings of the metropolitan, non-bourgeois woman and modern nudity: As a „Street Singer“ (c. 1862, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), as a travestied coquette („Mademoiselle V... in the Costume of an Espada“, 1862, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in „Breakfast Outdoors“ (1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and „Olympia“ (1863, Met). Ten years later, Victorine Meurent appeared once again in a modern portrait of a woman, as a reading mother in „The Railway“ (1873, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).
*Excerpt from https://artinwords.de/edouard-manet/