Théodore Duret was a French art critic and connoisseur. His father was in the brandy business in Cognac. He was a great champion of the American painter James MacNeill Whistler, to whom he was introduced by Manet.
"There in the Salon of 1882 he found himself among the elect. On the frame of his pictures was the inscription, the infallible guarantee of respectability - hors concours" [but] "the public... scarcely showed any more real appreciation of his pictures than formerly; they were altogether unable to understand the meaning of the principal picture that he sent in that year"
"Manet painted her [the barmaid] with the vacant eye and placid expression which he always gave to this type of woman"
Théodore Duret, Manet and the French Impressionists, 1910
