Prising Le déjeuner and Olympia away from the Musée d’Orsay has not proved feasible so in Manet: Portraying Life—the first exhibition of its kind here—the Royal Acad- emy has gathered some 50 of his portraits— as well as his pastels and prints—as a means to examine his role in 19th-century art and beyond.

As with his more celebrated pictures the key to his portraits lies in the past. Among other places Manet travelled both to the Netherlands and to Spain where he studied first hand the work of Hals, Goya and, above all, Velázquez. These three, in his estimation, “really knew what they were doing . . . they never lost sight of reality”. Reality was an important attribute to him because he equated it with modernity: it meant the particular rather than the ideal and the momentary rather than the marmoreal. So determined was he to be a Realist that he liked to claim that he painted his portraits in a single sitting; his subjects, however, frequently told a different story. One model complained that “after the fifteenth sitting, my portrait was no further advanced than on the first day”, possibly because Manet also used to scrape off the previous day’s work to start again. The painter’s eye, he said, should see “only that which it looks upon, and that, as for the first time”.

This was scrupulously planned realism. With many of his straight portraits he would isolate his sitters against empty back- grounds, as in his images of his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot and the journalist-politician Antonin Proust. With others he would make them part of the world. The Railway (1873) shows a woman and a girl sitting by some railings by the side of a railway cutting near the Gare Saint-Lazare where the child watches a locomotive pass by, leaving behind a plume of smoke. The pair are real people: the girl is the daughter of Manet’s neighbour Alphonse Hirsch, the woman is the painter- model Victorine Meurent, who had appeared so daringly nude in Le déjeuner and Olympia. In the background is the entrance to Manet’s studio.

This is then a double portrait (albeit an unconventional one—the girl is seen from behind), a street scene, a piece of role-playing, an example of social observation and a slice of self-reference. It is also a response to the advent of photography, a topic of interest to Manet and his peers. However well photography could capture likenesses with its long exposures, it couldn’t match what Manet was up to: no col- our, no immediacy and no transience (that puff of smoke was beyond a camera’s capabilities).