Édouard Manet is the bridge between academic tradition and modern art. His paintings caused scandal after scandal — Olympia (1863) with its unabashed nude staring directly at the viewer; Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) with its clothed men and naked woman in a contemporary park — because they brought the frank directness of Old Masters into the bourgeois parlor of Second Empire Paris. He was not technically an Impressionist yet was their spiritual father, encouraging Monet, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot. He died from complications of locomotor ataxia at 51.
