French painter. One of the foremost French artists of the 19th century, he is often regarded as the father of modern painting. Rebelling against the academic tradition, he developed a clear and unaffected realist style that was one of the founding forces of Impressionism . His subjects were mainly contemporary, such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882; Courtauld Art Gallery, London). Manet received a very traditional academic art education under a history painter; his real influences were Goya, Velázquez and Courbet. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe/Picnic on the Grass 1863 and Olympia 1865 (both Musée d'Orsay, Paris), though both based on Renaissance masterpieces, offended conservative tastes in their matter-of-fact treatment of the nude body. Though he never exhibited with the Impressionists – he had a classical sense of order and composition – many of them were were strongly influenced by his pioneering works, and he in turn,from the early 1870s, was influenced by figures such as Berthe…