Image:
Édouard Manet, “Argenteuil,” oil on canvas, 149 x 115 cm, first exhibited in the Salon of 1875, though completed the year before. In the summer of 1874, Manet had vacationed in the countryside near Argenteuil,
where he spent time with the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. Like the impressionists, Manet offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself.