Édouard Manet wanted to win the game. He did not build a rival pavilion like Courbet. He kept submitting to the Official Salon, year after year, wanting the jury's approval. The Kingmakers used that against him.

Manet was born into a comfortable Paris family. His father was a judge. The path was clear. He studied under Thomas Couture for six years, then spent years in the Louvre copying the masters. He learned their vocabulary. Then he used it to say something they never intended.

In 1865, Manet exhibited Olympia at the Salon. The painting showed a nude woman on a bed. This was not unusual. The Salon was full of nudes dressed up as Venus or nymphs, titillating under the cover of mythology. What Manet did differently was make her real. She stared back at the viewer. She was clearly a contemporary Parisian woman. She was not performing for anyone's comfort.

The critics manufactured a scandal. Guards were posted to keep crowds from attacking the canvas. The Kingmakers understood exactly what Manet had done. He stripped the polite fiction off the Salon's relationship with the female body and they punished him with public humiliation rather than argument.

Three years later, Manet painted The Execution of Maximilian. The French government had backed an Austrian archduke as Mexico's puppet emperor. Mexico executed him. Manet documented it in paint. The government banned the work from exhibition and suppressed the lithograph. Art as political record was too dangerous to display.

He died in 1883. Fifty-one years old. The Salon eventually gave him a medal. It did not change what he had already done.