The same is true of his Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), which is nominally a painting of a fashionable crowd taking their ease and listening to a band on a sunny weekend but which includes portraits of the painter’s family and friends, including Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Jacques Offenbach and Manet’s brother Eugène. It is a painting that also shows why he was such a hero figure to the Impressionists in that it has all the breadth of touch and spontaneity of a picture painted en plein air even though such a crowded composition could only be produced in the studio.

However sympathetic Manet was to the Impressionists and their own interest in modern life, he never joined them and in- deed urged Monet to have a word with Re- noir: “You should encourage him to give up painting straight away; what he does is sim- ply awful.” Unfortunately Monet didn’t follow the advice; so Manet’s place in art history has to stand on his paintings alone.