Manet or Monet - Who's Who?

I was telling a friend about seeing a "Manet" and she said, "Don't you mean Monet?" I can understand the confusion. Two French impressionist painters with similar names, living at the same time who were also personal friends. It can seem confusing, so let's see if we can find the differences that distinguished Manet from Monet.

Since Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was born first, we'll start with him. Manet created the foundations for Impressionism. He walked the line between Realism and Impressionism. He painted directly from models to canvas as Realism required, but as an Impressionist, he worked quickly and completed the painting in one seating. He did not suffer the tedium of waiting for a layer of paint to dry and then adding another layer. No. Instead he applied the exact color directly and, if he didn't like it, he scraped it off and tried again.(Portrait of Berthe Morisot, Impressionist Artist)




By contrast, Claude Monet (1840-1926) was not interested much in the subject or model and preferred to consider the colors of the object. In other words, it wasn't a tree or grass. It was a square of green, a rectangle of blue, or a line of red. Monet would paint the same scene be it his gardens, a church or a stack of hay as changing bits of color.

How to tell whose work it is? If it is painted with dabs of color, you are looking at a Monet. If instead you are looking at models in a loosely painted style, it's a Manet.

Now, try your hand at identifying if the paintings below are Manet or Monet.