Édouard Manet

Finely dressed and carrying an elegant walking stick, influential French artist Édouard Manet appears before a stark background evocative of his own paintings as well as photographic portraits of the time. Created by his friend Henri Fantin-Latour, this depiction confronted the public perception of Manet as a radical bohemian painter of coarse and confrontational compositions (for an example of this, see his Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers). Fantin-Latour instead portrayed him as the genteel man-about-town he actually was.