Edouard Manet
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Edouard Manet trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Édouard Manet failed the Navy exam twice, scandalised Paris with a picnic and a courtesan, and spent his life insisting he belonged in the official Salon while every young Impressionist copied him. He never showed with them, yet they called him the father of modern painting. These 49 questions cover the man and the pictures: the judge's son and the Swedish godfather, Couture's studio, the Salon des Refusés, and the two canvases that started it all. You will get Olympia's model, cat and subscription, the Déjeuner's hidden brothers and borrowed Raphael poses, Music in the Tuileries and its Lusitania connection, the three Executions of Maximilian, The Railway at Saint-Lazare, Berthe Morisot and the marriage that made her family, and the impossible mirror of A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Easy questions cover the Orsay and the scandals; the hard tier asks about Oloron-Sainte-Marie, Malcolm Park, Kunsthalle Mannheim and Brasserie Reichshoffen. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novelist championed Manet in the press and sat for a portrait by him in 1868?
Émile Zola
Émile Zola defended Olympia in print against its many critics, and in Manet's portrait of the young novelist a print of that scandalous nude hangs on the wall behind his desk.
Q 02Manet twice failed the entrance exam for which career?
Naval officer
Naval officer was the compromise: his father, a judge, wanted a lawyer and Manet wanted to paint. He sailed to Rio on a training ship, failed the navy's exam twice and got his way.
Q 03Under which academic painter did the young Manet train in the 1850s?
Thomas Couture
Thomas Couture urged his pupils to paint modern life, yet when Manet showed him The Absinthe Drinker he is said to have replied that the only absinthe drinker was the painter.
Q 04Which two Spanish masters and one Dutchman shaped Manet's early style?
Velázquez, Goya and Frans Hals
Velázquez, Goya and Frans Hals: Manet met their work by copying in the Louvre and on trips abroad in the 1850s, and after a later visit to Spain he called Velázquez "the painter of painters".
Q 05At which 1863 alternative exhibition was Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe shown?
Salon des Refusés
The Salon des Refusés was Napoleon III's answer to artists protesting that year's harsh jury. Crowds came largely to laugh, but the uproar made Manet's name.
Q 06What was the original title of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?
Le Bain
Le Bain, "The Bath", is how the 1863 catalogue listed it. The name pointed viewers to the woman wading in the stream behind, not to the picnic that caused the uproar.
Q 07Which Raimondi engraving after Raphael supplied the poses of the Déjeuner's main figures?
The Judgement of Paris
The Judgement of Paris, engraved about 1515 after a design by Raphael, gave Manet the grouping of his seated figures. He dropped a revered old-master pose into a modern picnic, and the clash baffled viewers.
Q 08Which American painter's canvas was the other sensation beside Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1863?
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler showed Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, which London's Royal Academy had turned away the year before. It and Manet's picnic were the two most talked-about pictures in the show.
Q 09Which Titian painting supplied the pose for Olympia?
Venus of Urbino
Venus of Urbino shows a goddess reclining for the viewer's pleasure. Manet kept the pose but painted a modern Parisian courtesan who stares straight back, and that is what outraged the 1865 Salon.
Q 10Who was Manet's model for Olympia?
Victorine Meurent
Victorine Meurent posed for Manet for a decade, then took up the brush herself and went on to show her own paintings at the Paris Salon.
Q 11What animal stands at the foot of the bed in Manet's Olympia?
A black cat
A black cat, back arched, takes the place of the sleeping lapdog in the Renaissance nude Manet was reworking. He swapped an emblem of fidelity for one that 1865 viewers linked with the night streets.
Q 12Who organised the 1890 public subscription that gave Olympia to the French state?
Claude Monet
Claude Monet heard that Manet's widow might sell the painting to an American collector, so he spent a year raising the 20,000 francs she asked and offered the picture to the nation.
Q 13Which Paris museum holds both Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?
Musée d'Orsay
Q 21Which poet and which composer appear in the crowd of Manet's Music in the Tuileries?
Baudelaire and Offenbach
Baudelaire and Offenbach stand among the painter's own friends and family, with Manet himself at the far left edge. Showing his social set in place of heroes so angered some visitors that they threatened the canvas.
Q 22Which two cities share Manet's Music in the Tuileries under a long-disputed bequest?
London and Dublin
London and Dublin: Hugh Lane willed his pictures to London, switched to Dublin in a codicil nobody witnessed, then died on the Lusitania. Since 1959 the two galleries have settled the quarrel by taking turns.
Q 23Which Habsburg ruler's death by Mexican firing squad did Manet paint?
Musée d'Orsay, a converted railway station, now shows both pictures in peace. In 1865, by one friend's account, only the precautions of the Salon's officials kept Olympia from being slashed by angry visitors.
Q 14Which two of Manet's relatives posed for the men in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe?
His brothers and brother-in-law
The right-hand man blends Eugène and Gustave; the other is Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff.
Q 15Whom did Manet marry in 1863, the piano teacher his father had hired for his sons?
Suzanne Leenhoff
Suzanne Leenhoff and Manet had been a couple for about ten years, kept quiet from his domineering father. They married only after the old man died.
Q 16Who was Léon, the boy Manet painted in Boy Carrying a Sword and Boy Blowing Bubbles?
His wife's son
His wife's son, perhaps his own: Léon was born eleven years before the wedding and passed off as his mother's little brother. Whether his father was the painter or the painter's father is still argued over.
Q 17Which painter became Manet's sister-in-law by marrying his brother Eugène in 1874?
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot is credited with coaxing Manet into painting outdoors. He painted her portrait again and again before the wedding, which has fed talk of a suppressed romance ever since.
Q 18Who was Manet's only formal student?
Eva Gonzalès
Eva Gonzalès joined his studio in 1869 and sat for the portrait he sent to the next Salon. She died in childbirth in 1883, within a week of her teacher.
Q 19What name was given to the circle of painters around Manet and Morisot?
Batignolles group
Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Pissarro were drawn in through Morisot.
Q 20Why did Manet refuse to show with the Impressionists?
He preferred the official Salon
He preferred the official Salon and held that modern painters should win there, not walk away from it. He also had no wish to be seen as the spokesman of a group.
Maximilian
Maximilian was put on Mexico's throne by Napoleon III, who then pulled out his troops and left him to the firing squad. The pictures blamed the regime too plainly, and none could be shown in France.
Q 24Who tracked down and reassembled the cut-up fragments of Manet's large firing-squad painting?
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas bought up the pieces after Manet's family had cut the damaged canvas apart and sold them one by one. London's National Gallery acquired his rescued fragments in 1918.
Q 25Prints from which country taught Manet the flat colour and abrupt cropping of pictures like Boating?
Japan
Japan had only lately opened to Western trade, and its prints fascinated the Paris avant-garde. Manet went as far as painting a Japanese print and a folding screen into the background of a friend's portrait.
Q 26Which American Civil War sea battle off the French coast did Manet paint in 1864?
Kearsarge v. Alabama
Kearsarge v. Alabama: the Union warship sank the Confederate raider off Cherbourg in June 1864 while crowds watched from the shore. Working from press reports, Manet had his canvas in a Paris shop window within a month.
Q 27Which Paris station gives its alternative title to Manet's The Railway of 1873?
Gare Saint-Lazare
Gare Saint-Lazare is never actually shown. All Manet gives of the station is a cloud of white steam drifting behind the iron railings, while a woman and a child fill the foreground.
Q 28Which Washington museum owns Manet's The Railway?
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art owes it to the Havemeyers, American collectors steered toward the Impressionists by their friend Mary Cassatt. They bought the picture in 1898, and the family gave it to the nation in 1956.
Q 29When Prussian armies besieged Paris in 1870, Manet stayed to serve in which force?
The National Guard
The National Guard kept Manet in the besieged city, serving alongside a fellow painter, while several of the friends who would become the Impressionists sat out the war in London.
Q 30Which London gallery holds Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère?
Courtauld
The Courtauld owes the picture to Samuel Courtauld, a textile industrialist who founded the art institute in 1932 and filled its gallery with his own Impressionist paintings.