
"Manet comes alive in Brombert's] pages. . . . At times her biography reads like a substantial and detailed 19th-century novel. . . . Brombert's Edouard Manet gives us not only a portrait of a complex artist but, in its authority and its range, a portrait of an age as...

This text examines Manet's relationships with his parents, with his secret adopted son and with his wife and lovers. Also covered are his friendships with Beaudelaire and Zola. He emerges as a complex and contradictory character, who suffered from syphilis and had an illegitimate...