ONE CAN IMAGINE the outrage provoked by “Olympia,” by Edouard Manet (1832-1883), when the painting appeared at the Paris Salon, in 1865. Even today, his frankly sexual nude is audacious. The ...

CHICAGO — Édouard Manet was succumbing to the ordeal of late-stage syphilis when he painted some of the freshest, most affecting flower paintings in the history of art. Against dark backgrounds, ...

For almost as long as artists have been painting floral still lifes, the subject has been doubted or belittled when it hasn’t been dismissed. Even the great Dutch flower paintings of the early 1600s ...

In the final months of his life, painter Edouard Manet executed a series of 16 small flower pictures based on bouquets given to him by friends. Though the paintings showed no loss of technical command ...

Edouard Manet’s imposing 1882 painting of a winsome, weary barmaid at the Folies-Bergère has cast a long shadow across the final years of the artist’s life. Manet died the next year, at age 51, but ...