Quebra-cabeça House at Rueil by Edouard Manet

House at Rueil by Edouard Manet, oil on canvas 1882, is a landscape painting of a large yellow house with a tall shade tree, grass, gardens and a walkway path filling the foreground. Manet casually constructs the tranquil scene in contrasting vertical and horizontal geometry, filling the picture plane with middle and foreground landscape elements, capturing the warmth of spring sunlight against the deep, cool shades beneath the luxuriant trees. In a broad range of light to dark and warm to cool tones, the artist captures a seeming moment in time much like his fellow Impressionist painters, though he still boldly deploys the deep ivory black tones that other Impressionists avoided in favor of painterly color effects. Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) was a French realist painter and one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement whose controversial paintings marked the founding of modern art. Pursuing art at a young age, Manet studied for 6 years under the academic painter Thomas Couture, and on trips abroad encountered the Dutch masters as well as the Spanish painters Velazquez and Goya. Opening his own studio in Paris, Manet produced many paintings under the influence of the Realism of Courbet, painting scenes from modern life. His masterpieces Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia of 1863 aroused great controversy, and though the artist continued to exhibit in the official Paris Salon he befriended Degas, Monet, Renoir, and other key Impressionist painters. Painting in a loose, sketchy manner of painterly brush strokes and flattened forms which some found to be unfinished, Manet produced many scenes of bohemian cafe nightlife, journalistic scenes of wars and current events, as well subjects from the streets of Paris with such a spontaneity and compositional innovation that they made a lasting influence on younger generations of artists and enshrined him as the true "painter of modern life". Though the artist died young, Manet created paintings that were the lodestone and rallying point for the school of Impressionism and the founders of modern painting.