Monet or Manet? The difference between two commonly confused names

The difference between Monet and Manet is easy to remember once you see the works. Édouard Manet (1832–1883) painted people in modern Paris, with strong contrasts and a lot of black, and never exhibited with the Impressionists. Claude Monet (1840–1926) was the leader of Impressionism and painted the light on landscape and water, with short, pure brushstrokes. Manet was the older model; Monet was the one who took the step in full.

Facts

Why the names get confused

The names differ by only one letter, the two were active in Paris at the same time, knew each other and are often mentioned in the same sentence. As early as the 1860s critics sometimes mixed them up. When the young Monet exhibited two seascapes at the Salon in 1865, some visitors took them for works by Manet, a story often retold as the beginning of their acquaintance.

Yet they are easy to tell apart once you see the pictures. They were of different ages, had different aims and a different relationship to Impressionism. Manet was eight years older and wanted to be recognised by the official Salon. Monet wanted to get away from it and create something of his own.

Manet: the human being in the modern city

Édouard Manet came from a well-to-do Paris family and trained under an academic teacher. His models were the Spaniards, above all Velázquez, and the Dutchman Frans Hals, and from them he learnt to paint broad, flat surfaces and to use black as a colour. His subjects were people: a woman in a bar, a company in the park, a singer, a portrait of a friend.

Manet became famous through scandals. The Luncheon on the Grass was shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, with a naked woman among clothed men in a park. Olympia, also painted in 1863 and shown at the Salon in 1865, is a naked woman who looks straight at the viewer. What outraged was not the nudity but that she was not a goddess but a contemporary woman in Paris. Manet painted her flat, with sharp contrasts between pale skin and dark background, almost without the soft transitions the academy demanded.

In this way Manet became a model for the younger artists, but he never exhibited at the Impressionists' own exhibitions. He went on submitting his works to the Salon for the rest of his life. Read more about his background in the guide to Realism.

Monet: light in the landscape

Claude Monet grew up in Le Havre on the Channel coast and learnt to paint outdoors from the landscape painter Eugène Boudin. He wanted to capture the light of a moment: sun on water, mist over a harbour, shadows on snow. He therefore painted quickly, with short strokes of pure colour side by side, and often refrained from mixing black into the shadows.

Impression, Sunrise of 1872 shows the harbour at Le Havre in morning haze, with an orange sun reflected in the grey water. It was shown at the first joint exhibition in Paris in 1874, and a critic named the whole group the Impressionists after its title, as a jibe. Monet became the movement's leader and held to its method longer than anyone. Later he painted series of the same subject in different light, haystacks and Rouen Cathedral, and from 1883 his garden at Giverny with its pond and water lilies.

Monet lived long, until 1926, and his late, large Water Lilies paintings point towards abstract painting. See the guide to Impressionism.

Where they met

Despite the differences they were close. In the summer of 1874 Manet worked alongside Monet at Argenteuil outside Paris, and his palette grew lighter. He painted Monet as he sat painting in his boat, which he had fitted out as a studio. Berthe Morisot, who exhibited with the Impressionists, married Manet's brother Eugène the same year.

Manet's last great painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1882, shows how close he had come to the light of Impressionism, but the subject is still a person in the modern city. In the app's network you can see the connections between them and the rest of the circle, including Renoir, Degas and Pissarro.

How to keep them apart

If you see a person at the centre, in a city setting or studio, with black clothes and strong contrasts, it is probably Manet. If you see a landscape, a waterway, a garden or a street seen from a distance, dissolved in light, short brushstrokes, it is probably Monet. A memory aid: Manet with an a as in Olympia, Monet with an o as in pond, the pond of his water lilies.

Place them side by side in Compare, Olympia against Impression, Sunrise, and the difference is immediately visible. Olympia hangs in the Musée d’Orsay and Impression, Sunrise in the Musée Marmottan Monet, both in Paris; see the guide Art to see in Paris and French Impressionism.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

Which of them exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874?