We are more familiar with Manet’s images of women, mostly without their clothes on too, but at the impressive exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, Manet Portraying Life (until this Sunday, 14th April), there are some memorable portraits of his male friends and relations. Édouard Manet (1832-1883) loved women but he was also a highly clubbable male who enjoyed the company of his men friends and who expressed his respect and gratitude to a number of them, including the writer and painter, Marcellin Desboutin, in a series of characterful portraits that place Manet in the revered tradition of Velasquez  Goya and Hals.

Desboutin and the landscape painter, Joseph Gall, both obviously enjoyed their pipes and, in The Smoker, there is no question about Gall’s smoker’s contemplative pleasure. Here Manet celebrates the art of his admired 17th Century Spanish predecessors. He hasn’t adopted the earlier period’s fondness for allegory though, this man isn’t contemplating the transience of time. He is savouring the tobacco and thinking very personal thoughts that are none of our business.

Manet’s lifelong friend and biographer Antonin Proust (1832-1905) – no relation to Marcel Proust  – positively beams at his friend from this slightly tongue-in-cheek portrait of Proust in his dandyish finery. The affection between the two of them is palpable.

Manet not only admired the realist novelist and critic, Émile Zola, but he was grateful to him too for the writer’s defence of Manet’s artistic radicalism. The favour is returned in this crammed and relatively conventional portrait of Zola sitting, somehow squeezed into the foreground, in benign judgment on Manet’s place in the progressive art of late 19th. century France. As with his other portraits, he is as interested in making an interesting composition from a restricted palette of colours – his favourites, mostly black, grey and brown.

The Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé admired Manet’s modernity and publicly defended the artist as his style moved away from the traditionally highly finished works of his youth. Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé is full of movement and light, mistily expressing the spirit of the poet in a picture where the concrete feels insubstantial and mysterious. Here, once more there is also a celebration of tobacco and the cigar smoke sharing the same consistency as the furniture and the fashionable Japanese wallpaper.

Emile-Charles-Julien la Rochenoire (1825-1899), who specialised in painting animals, is one of Manet’s relatively few pastel portraits of men, most of them done in his last years. La Rochenoire’s average middle-aged male presence is animated by Manet’s energetic brushstrokes and by the exotic wallpaper that frames him.

In another of Manet’s works in homage of the old masters, the boy blowing bubbles, is Léon Leenhoff (1852-1927), the illegitimate son of Manet’s wife Suzanne Leenhoff. He may have been Manet’s son but there is no definitive evidence to prove it but he became Manet’s heir and his mother legitimized him in 1900. Whatever the birth details, Manet was fond of the boy and often used him as a model in his scenes of contemporary life. Here, as with The Smoker, the artist seems more interested in the contrasts of dark and light rather than any traditional allegorical reference to life’s transience.

The sixteen year-old Léon stars as a moody teenager tottering on the verge of manhood in The Luncheon, with his back on the comfortable domesticity of the background and the sinister armoury of ‘masculine’ weapons on a chair next to him as he gazes introvertedly into space in another composition where Manet plays with the possibilities of black and grey.

A couple of years later, Léon is seen pedalling furiously on the ‘bone-shaker’ a wooden precursor of the modern bicycle known as a velocipede then all the rage in fashionable Paris. The unfinished state of the portrait, another study in black and grey, only heightens the sense of speed and fun in what must have been a very uncomfortable ride.

Maybe on the same seaside holiday in the Northern French resort of Arcachon as the adventure with the velocipede, Léon sits enjoying a cigarette in the holiday apartment with his mother Suzanne who looks cheerfully unconcerned by her son’s smoking habit as she looks out to sea with legs jauntily crossed. Manet made full use of his family as models and here, it is not important who these people are but their black clothed figures contrast dramatically with the grey walls and the loosely painted sea that we English call the English Channel.

Manet’s family and friends mingle with leading figures of Parisian modern art, in his group painting Music in the Tuileries Gardens. Manet himself stands looking at us on the extreme left of the frame and invites us to join what was then the progressive set. The men in the picture, as in so many of his portraits, are usefully dressed in the then gentlemanly uniform of black and grey. In Manet, it is the women who stand out as they undoubtedly did to him on his perambulations around Parisian society. No more so when they sit naked on the grass having lunch with the two respectably clad gentlemen in one of his most famous paintings, Déjeuner sur l’herbe, here the “other” version of the painting is in the exhibition, not a copy but a less ‘finished’ later version of the better known painting in the Musée d’Orsay.

There has never been such a large collection of Manet’s portraits assembled in one exhibition so, if you want to see them, hurry along to London’s Royal Academy of Arts before the paintings are go back to their permanent homes on Sunday.

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If you have been to London this year, you are bound to have seen the distinctive poster for the Royal Academy of Arts’ giant exhibition of works by Édouard Manet (1832-1883), Manet Portraying Life which finishes this Sunday, 14th April. If you have a soul, you would have noticed too the provocatively beautiful woman enticing you to go to this splendid exhibition of many of Manet’s portraits.

I was lucky enough to go there last Saturday when Spring finally decided to arrive in the UK and when London sprung into gear to look its best. If you haven’t had the privilege of meeting this lady before, let me introduce you to the artist and Manet friend, the alluring Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). It is one of the images that you will keep in your head long after this exhibition closes. Looking at it, there is very little  doubt what she thought of Manet or what he thought of her. We are almost intruding on a very steamy moment. But no apologies needed – Manet likes to embarrass his audience. The exhibition is devoted exclusively to his portraits so you’ll be disappointed if you go along expecting to see the most well-known of his works but you’ll soon recover seeing the magnificent series of paintings that show how his style moved on from his admiration of the great Spanish masters of portraiture, Velasquez and Goya to the radical modern style that made him the father of 20th Century art.

His hurriedly executed portrait of Berthe, when she was in deepest mourning for her father, is both intimate and chillingly emotional but it is also an excuse, always important for the artist, to experiment with the infinite variety of his use of black. Berthe Morisot became Berthe Manet but she achieved this by marrying Manet’s brother Eugène. Historians are still undecided about the true nature of her feelings for Édouard but the expression in many of his portraits of her leaves very little to the imagination.

Manet’s favourite model, the woman we all know, even if we don’t realize it, from his most famous paintings, was Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) an artist and cabaret singer who as well as modelling  for Manet, also sat for Edgar Degas. Her haunted expression, a Manet speciality, was emphasised by her extremely pale skin and her strikingly red hair. She is the naked woman in Manet’s  most scandalous paintings, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia.

She last appears in his famous painting The Railway where she looks up from her book and sadly stares at us in silent communication. She lived the rest of her life with a woman called Marie Dufour who burnt all Victorine’s possessions and, I suspect, secrets, when she died three years after her friend.

Manet’s only official student was the artist Eva Gonzalès (1849-1883) who often modelled for her teacher mostly famously in this rather awkward portrait where she is very obviously posing as a painter in what we can only assume to be a deliberately awkward position and dressed rather impractically in an expensive-looking white dress. Here white is Manet’s new black. The painting is not her’s  – it is one of Manet’s. She, like Victorine, is not so much concentrating on her work but looking into space and contemplating something that brings a smile to her lips. Sadly she died in childbirth only months after Manet’s death.

Much less glamourous than these women but Manet’s most constant companion and model was his wife, the plumply maternal Dutch pianist, Suzanne Leenhoff (1829-1906). She was an impressive musician, encouraged by Liszt, with a quick wit and lively sense of humour. She was an equal partner  at the manet’s Tuesday and Thursday soirées and is frequently the model for his portraits and also in his scenes of contemporary life. In spite of the many beautiful models in Manet’s life, Suzanne apppears to have remained the object of his deepest affection.

She admired the so-called “New German Music”, especially the works of Wagner and Liszt and may have had passionate discussions on the subject with her husband and their great friend, the poet, Charles Baudelaire. If I could time travel to Paris in the 1870s then I would’ve loved to have met this interesting woman.

I particularly like the jaunty way she crosses her leg in the picture of her and her (and maybe Manet’s) son Léon in the apartment in Arcachon.

She is also seen blurrily with her widowed mother-in-law in Manet’s poetically mystical painting The Swallows – Suzanne seems to have always been on hand to fill a scene or two.

Manet obviously loved women as we can see in the many charmingly alluring portraits that he made of them – seemingly just for the pleasure of painting them.

His pastel portraits were new to me and their delicacy not only heightened his subject’s femininity but also their individual personalitites. Here too though is that distant look seen most famously in his picture A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (Courtault Institute, London).

It was interesting seeing his mastery of the simple drawn line too in this expressive but lightly sketched Girl in a Summer Bonnet.

Manet’s portraits of beautiful women demonstrate his appreciation of women as they were emerging in the late 19th Century with a new freedom. Sadly his appreciation of women may also have led to his premature death from syphilis. The women in his pictures are true personalitites, even the sweetly pretty faces in his pastels. He brings out the personality too of vivacious little six-year old Lise Campinéanu (1872-1949). She can barely retrain herself from leaping out of that pose and rushing across the room to tell us just how exciting it is to be painted by the great Monsieur Manet. I’ll take a look at some of the other Manet’s other portraits tomorrow.

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