The Balcony by Édouard Manet was exhibited at the 1869 Paris Salon and was considered a complete dud.

Manet wasn’t the most beloved artist just yet and the critics were incredibly harsh on his work. The Great Universal Dictionary of the 19th Century said that this painting was one that contributed to the reputation that Manet had bad taste. Gasp! The public just couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact that all of the people in the painting were ignoring each other, as if they were objects in a still life (exactly Manet’s intention). It wasn’t proper. A jokester critic said that the shutters ought to have been closed, and a friend of Manet and the model for the girl in the front left, Berthe Morisot said, “I appear strange rather than ugly. I hear that those looking at me have murmured the words Femme fatale." Not even the models, who were his friends, Berthe Morisot, Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, and Fanny Claus, and his son, Léon Leenhoff, stood up for the piece! Manet didn’t care what his haters were saying and hung this painting next to his other, more famous work, Olympia until the day he died. After that, Gustave Caillebotte bought it and displayed it in his home and after he died, it was left to the French state. The painting bopped around from the Musée du Luxembourg to the Louvre to its final resting place, the Musée d'Orsay.

Like most progressive artists who are ridiculed by their contemporaries, Manet was later considered a master painter and like, has his artworks on Louis Vuitton bags and stuff. This painting became the cover art for the Barnes and Noble edition of "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen in 2009. And everyone knows that true fame is having millions of high schoolers across America doodling on the faces that you painted.