Olympia
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Manet took the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino and gave it to a prostitute who looks straight back. The 1865 Salon was scandalized.
★ 8.9
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1860s
1860 – 1869
Showing 20 artworks from the 1860s
Luncheon on the Grass
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A naked woman picnics with two clothed men and looks calmly out at us. The Salon refused it, so it hung with the rejects.
★ 8.9
Bain a la Grenouillere
1869 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet and Renoir set up side by side at this riverside resort and worked out the quick broken stroke that became Impressionism.
★ 7.3
The Magpie
1869 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A single magpie on a gate in deep snow, the shadows tinged blue and violet rather than grey. The Salon turned it down.
★ 7.3
L'Origine du Monde
1866 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Too explicit to exhibit for over a century, it stayed in private hands behind curtains and screens. No myth, no excuse, just the body.
★ 6.9
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
1863 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bierstadt went west with a survey expedition and came home with peaks lit like an opera set, which is what the country wanted.
★ 6.8
The Balcony
1868 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three people at a green railing all looking different ways and none at each other. Berthe Morisot is the one seated and dreaming.
★ 6.8
Twilight in the Wildnerness
1860 · Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
Not a single figure anywhere in it. Church painted this burning sky in 1860, and people have read the Civil War into it since.
★ 6.8
Ugolino and His Sons
1867 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Ugolino bites his own knuckles while his sons starve against his legs, from the passage in Dante where he is tempted to eat them.
★ 6.8
The Veteran in a New Field
1865 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Union jacket lies discarded in the corner while the man who wore it swings a scythe through wheat, which is the whole point.
★ 6.7
Garden at Sainte-Adresse
1867 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet's own father sits among the gladioli on a terrace, and the young painter tips the space up in flat bands like a Japanese print.
★ 6.6
Young Spartans Exercising
1860 · National Gallery, London
Spartan girls taunt the boys into wrestling, and Degas made the bodies awkward rather than ideal, which is not how history painting was done.
★ 6.1
Races at Longchamp
1867 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The horses come straight at you instead of across the frame, which nobody painting racehorses had bothered to try.
★ 5.7
Woman with a Parrot
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Courbet took the nude to the Salon with her hair loose, her body relaxed, and a parrot on her hand instead of a myth.
★ 5.7
Prisoners from the Front
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Union officer faces three captured Confederates and the two halves of the country study each other. Homer had covered the war as an illustrator.
★ 5.6
The Hermitage at Pontoise
1867 · Guggenheim, New York City
Plain village houses on a hillside, built in solid earthy blocks. Pissarro refused to prettify the countryside and gave it structural weight instead.
★ 5.4
Family Reunion
1867 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Eleven of the painter's family on a shaded terrace near Montpellier. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight.
★ 5.4
Le Sommeil
1866 · Petit Palais, Paris
Two women asleep and entwined, painted on private commission and therefore out of reach of the Salon and its proprieties.
★ 5.4
The Bullfight
1864 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Manet cut up the original canvas because he was unhappy with it, and this is one of the surviving pieces.
★ 4.8
Bathers (Summer Scene)
1869 · Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Young men lounging on a riverbank in dappled light, the oldest subject in painting given ordinary modern bodies and modern poses.
★ 4.8