Irma Brunner by Edouard Manet Postcard

Irma Brunner by Edouard Manet, pastel painting c. 1880, is a profile portrait of an elegantly dressed young French woman in salmon pink blouse with high collar and ruffles with a large, black feathered hat over her tied back, dark brown hair. Manet boldly contrasts smoothly modeled pastel tones with deft strokes of the pastel chalks defining the sitter’s features and details, in a brilliant tonal range from the porcelain whites of the woman’s complexion to the deep, velvet blacks of her hat and hair. The artist creates a striking image of a stylish young woman of 19th century Paris, painted spontaneously as if capturing a fleeting moment in time. Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French realist painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement whose controversial paintings marked the founding of modern art. Pursuing art at a young age, Manet studied for 6 years under the academic painter Thomas Couture, and on trips abroad encountered the Dutch masters as well as the Spanish painters Velazquez and Goya. Opening his own studio in Paris, Manet produced many paintings under the influence of the Realism of Courbet, painting scenes from modern life. His masterpieces Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia of 1863 aroused great controversy, and though the artist continued to exhibit in the official Paris Salon he befriended Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other key Impressionist painters. Painting in a loose, sketchy manner of painterly brush strokes and flattened forms which some found to be unfinished, Manet produced many scenes of bohemian cafe nightlife, journalistic scenes of wars and current events, as well subjects from the streets of Paris with such a spontaneity and compositional innovation that they made a lasting influence on younger generations of artists and enshrined him as the true "painter of modern life". Though the artist died young, Manet created paintings that were the lodestone and rallying point for the school of Impressionism and the founders of modern painting.