CHARLES WILLIAMS’ MUSINGS

I love Manet, always have. I love A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, The Luncheon. I am prepared to follow the wilder excesses of his stylistic experimentations too, because I trust him. There’s a lovely portrait of his friend Carolus-Duran in the Barber Institute at Birmingham University, which seems unfinished, but somehow I want to look again and again at it. I know he knows what he’s up to. I love his deep, insatiable interest in the texture, light and colours of the world he lived in, the clarity of his vision; I read Zola quite a bit as a young man, and I think Manet gives you more than Zola, you get more of an idea of that world.

You can’t just look and move on though, it’s not a case of riffling through the work. Nor can you just accept what other people say about him, although much has been written, and it’s interesting. You need to look carefully and long and look for yourself. There is a lot written about A Bar at the Folies Bergère, for example, about the perspective – who is the viewer, why is the reflection off to one side, etc – and to be honest it’s not going to help.

It is a mistake, for example, to treat perspective and truth as if they were the same thing, forgetting that perspective was invented to make convincing visualisations of prospective architectural projects, not to make visual observations more accurate. Perspective bears little relationship to how we actually look at things, and in fact the more you look at this painting the more you realise that linear perspective is more or less forgotten; each object or group of objects seems to have its own perspective.