A Parisian Rebel: The Life and Art of Édouard Manet Édouard Manet, born in 1832 into a comfortable bourgeois family in Paris, was hardly destined for the life of a revolutionary artist. His father, a respected judge, envisioned a secure future for his son in law or perhaps naval service – respectable professions befitting their social standing. Yet, even as a young boy, Manet’s heart belonged to art. At eleven, he began formal drawing lessons, and though briefly apprenticed to the academic painter Thomas Couture, he quickly found Couture's rigid methods stifling. This early resistance foresh…