Masked Ball at the Opera Edouard Manet Tie

Masked Ball at the Opera by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas 1873, is a painting of a dense crowd of people in the halls of an opera house wearing bright, colorful costumes, masks, and formal evening wear and black top hats. Manet composes the lively scene in loose, painterly strokes of buttery oil paint, capturing the stark contrasts of light, dark, color, form and movement in a depiction of middle class life in Paris. The sketch-like treatment of alla prima brush strokes and flatness of form and space demonstrate the importance of the artist in the Impressionist movement and influence on subsequent modern painting as the true painter of modern life. 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.