The subject of the paintings included in Manet: A Model Family, on view at Boston’s Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, would ostensibly be the members of the painter’s family. The true subject of Édouard Manet’s paintings is of course painting itself – in the sense that if his work does anything, it insists that painting must henceforth engage with its own preconditions. As Michel Foucault would observe, Manet begins a ceaseless movement ‘by which each rule that is posed, or each rule that is deduced, induced or inferred from each of the preceding acts, finds itself rejected and refused by the following act.’ This is the essential reason why Manet is regarded as the founder of modern art by such figures as Foucault and Clement Greenberg, among others – because he inaugurates a revolution in painting, one which does more than pave the way for the Impressionists (which is habitually noted), but in fact can be seen as the forerunner of Abstract Expressionism (just as often overlooked).

Manet frequently used the members of his close-knit family as models – including his wife Suzanne, her son Léon (of whom he or may not have been the biological father), his own mother and father, and the great painter Berthe Morisot, who would become his sister-in-law when she married his younger brother Eugéne. But they were ultimately models, to be used in ways that allowed the artist to reckon with the old masters while consciously breaking away from the tradition of those same painters which he idolized, such as Velásquez, Goya and the greatest of the Flemish painters, Peter Paul Rubens. Manet heeded Eugène Delacroix’s advice to “look at Rubens, draw inspiration from Rubens, copy Rubens. Rubens was God.” And we can see Manet paying Rubens direct homage in paintings such as Fishing (1862-63), which was lent to the Gardner by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For color, composition and variety there is no painting on view to match this work which Manet painted as a wedding gift to his soon-to-be wife, Suzanne Leenhoff. While the two stand together at the lower right dressed in seventeenth-century costume, posed like Rubens and his wife in the Flemish painter’s Park of the Château de Steen (1635), their son Léon can be seen, fishing rod in hand, on the far end of the stream.

Even as Manet chafed at academic training, he immersed himself in the work of his great predecessors; and as we know from an 1865 letter to Henri Fantin-Latour, Manet was thoroughly “enchanted” by the portraits painted by Velásquez, which he regarded as nothing less than masterpieces one and all. I cannot help but be reminded of Charlie Parker’s relationship to the saxophonist Lester Young, whose playing he revered so much so that he learned his solos note-for-note, only to go on to create a musical language and........

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