Like Monet and the other Impressionists, Manet began to add white to his colors to brighten them as well as using bold colors directly from the paint tube, a new invention of the era in 1841.Manet wanted his paintings to have a sense of immediacy about them, so rather than laboriously overworking parts with which he was struggling, he would wipe them off almost completely, keeping only the bottommost layer, and repaint them so that they would appear fresh.В He said, 'When you've got it, you've got it.This helped to direct the viewer's eye to the more important parts of the painting. Manet used heavier applications of oil paint on his main subject and thinner layers in the background and in less significant areas.Manet liked to use black and used it masterfully.В Whereas Impressionists like Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) used blue or purple to paint shadows, Manet freely used black, influenced by Spanish painters Velazquez (1599-1660) and Francisco de Goya (1746-1828).This serves to flatten the picture plane somewhat and shows an influence of the Japanese prints of the time. The range of middle values is diminished in favor of greater contrast of light and dark. He used subtle areas of color rather than gradations of value to suggest form and modeling.His paintings depict shallow pictorial space because of the ambiguity of brushstroke. If you look closely at his paintings or enlarge them on your computer monitor, you can see that he does not care whether a brushstroke from a background element happens over a brushstroke from a foreground element. Manet was more interested in conveying the paint on a two-dimensional surface than in conveying realistic three-dimensional space.He did not draw his subject carefully before painting but rather blocked in the figures and forms on an underpainting of creamy off-white or pale gray with local color after a loose sketch with a fluid paint of dark umber. Manet's approach to painting is very direct.Unlike Realist painters such as Jean Francois Millet (1814-1875) and Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), who focused on paintings of rural scenes, Manet painted Parisian city life and contemporary urban themes.This was shocking because people at that time were used to seeing idealized female nudes modeled on historical, mythical, or biblical themes.

Manet painted nudes as real women, as in the painting, 'Olympia,' in which he portrayed the subject as an upper-class prostitute.We all have a more or less crooked nose and an irregular mouth.' One eye is never exactly the same as the other. Manet said, 'There's no symmetry in nature. As a realist painter, they portrayed real people with real expressions and irregularities. His portraits were not idealized like those of the Classical Renaissance painters.In 'The Railway ,' shown above, the little girl has her back to the viewer, while her caregiver is looking up, interrupted from her reading, as if to ask, 'What do you want?' His subjects were not necessarily looking directly at the viewer, or if they were, they were looking in a challenging way. They were visible to the eye rather than so finely blended as to be invisible. His brushstrokes were loose, broad, and quick.Manet painted alla prima, meaning painting 'all at once,' with wet layers of oil paint applied on top of existing wet layers rather than the traditional way of painting by building up layers of glaze on dried layers of paint.Manet painted en plein air, along with other Impressionists, and did sketches on site and returned to the studio to complete his paintings.

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