All Objects

Madame Manet, ca. 1876
Oil on canvas
23 7/8 × 20 in. (60.6 × 50.8 cm)
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon, Pasadena, California

Suzanne Leenhoff was born in Delft in 1829. A talented pianist, she joined the Manet household in 1849 as the family’s music teacher and, in 1863, married Édouard Manet. Baudelaire wrote to a mutual friend that Manet’s new wife was reportedly “beautiful, very kind, and a very great artist.”

The Ragpicker, ca. 1865–71, possibly reworked 1876–77
Oil on canvas
76 3/4 × 51 1/2 in. (194.9 × 130.8 cm)
The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena, California

The Ragpicker is the culmination of a series that Manet retrospectively dubbed his “4 Philosophers” when the art dealing firm of Durand-Ruel purchased them in 1872. In these innovative paintings, Manet overlaid two themes: the seventeenth-century Spanish tradition of “beggar-philosophers” and the contemporary Parisian social type displaced by aggressive urban planning.

Fish and Shrimp, 1864
Oil on canvas
17 5/8 × 28 3/4 in. (44.8 × 73 cm)
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California

By 1863, Manet’s often provocative subject matter had exasperated critics. “He has all the harshness of a green fruit that will never ripen,” one wrote. But when Manet’s virtuosic paint handling was applied to inoffensive still-life subjects, such as this, his talent was difficult to deny. As Émile Zola declared in 1867, well before Manet entered the artistic canon, his still lifes had become “masterpieces for everyone.”