Manet's loose brush, painted by hand

Why Manet

Manet used black as a colour, so the wall and the light both matter

His canvases are low in contrast and full of greys, which means the room around them does half the work.

Manet worked thin and quick, and he treated black as a colour rather than a shadow. Up close, a good hand-painted version shows exactly that: flat, confident areas of ivory black meeting warm grey with almost no blending, then a few loaded strokes for a ribbon, a glass, a cuff. Photographs flatten all of it. In oil on a wall, the surface reads as paint first and picture second, which is how his contemporaries saw it.

Go bigger than feels safe with the figure paintings. The originals are close to life-size, and much under a metre wide the faces stop carrying across a room. Still lifes are the opposite: keep them small and hang them low, near seated eye level. Light matters too, since cool white LEDs turn his greys blue and deaden the blacks. Off-white, putty and mid-grey walls suit him; a dark feature wall swallows the whole tonal range.

How your painting is made

1. Choose the size and finishSeven standard sizes from 60 × 50cm to 200 × 135cm. Stretched ready to hang, rolled, or one of our frames. The size guide on every painting shows it to scale.
2. Painted to order, by handA university-trained artist paints your piece in oils on canvas, working from the original. Two to three weeks at the easel, then drying time.
3. Stretched, framed, checkedGallery-wrapped or framed in our workshop, then photographed and checked before it leaves.
4. Delivered free, Australia-wideMade to order in 21 to 28 days, then tracked to your door. Thirty-day money-back guarantee if it isn't what you hoped.