The fisherman (Manet)

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The fisherman
Édouard Manet , around 1862
46 × 56 cm
oil on canvas
From the Heydt Museum , Wuppertal

The fisherman , also Der Fischzug or Der Fischfang (French: Le pêcheur or La pêche ), is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet from around 1862 . The picture, 46 cm high and 56 cm wide, painted in oil on canvas, shows a fisherman in a boat hauling in his net in the north of Paris. The painting belongs to the collection of the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal.

Image description

The picture shows a river landscape with a fisherman in his boat . From a slightly elevated position, the view goes to the rowboat at the bottom of the picture, which takes up almost the entire width of the picture. The outside of the boat is painted dark brown, on the bow and stern small areas are highlighted with reddish paint and on the inside there are gray areas. On the outside left of the boat, like a boat name, the signature "Manet" is affixed to a gray area in black letters. In this boat there is a fisherman seen from the side. He stands on his left leg and supports himself on the front side wall with his right foot, while his upper body and head are bent forward. He is just about to pull a fishing net out of the water with his right hand. A wooden vessel for the caught fish is positioned in front of him in the boat, behind him the stationary oars can be seen. The fisherman wears long dark gray trousers, a red belt, a white shirt and a yellowish straw hat. The face, which is not very detailed, has a dark complexion. His whole appearance marks him out as a professional fisherman. It has nothing in common with a city dweller who goes fishing in his free time.

The opposite bank of the river occupies the upper half of the picture. Manet painted a wooded hilly landscape here with rough brushstrokes. While individual tree trunks can be seen on the left edge of the picture, there are undefined areas in the rest of the background in green, ocher, dark brown or black, the sketchy execution of which does not allow a clear description. On the left, on the bank of the other side of the river, there are two other boats, which may be unmanned and attached to poles protruding from the water. Possibly the dark area behind them on land is a keeled-up boat. The colors and shapes of the opposite bank are reflected on the water surface, painted in light gray. The strong light-dark contrasts and the reduced choice of colors in the picture are typical of Manet's style of painting in the early 1860s.

Images of the Île Saint-Ouen

The model for the landscape in the background of The Fisherman was probably the area on the Seine around the island of Île Saint-Ouen north of Paris. This island, also called Île du Châtelier, grew together with other islands towards the end of the 19th century to form today's Île Saint-Denis . When Manet was working on Der Fischer , there was still a rural environment here, which gave way to urban settlement in later decades. Manet had known the Seine near the Île Saint-Ouen since childhood, as the artist's family had owned extensive estates in nearby Gennevilliers for generations and he had repeatedly explored the landscape on excursions.

In the early 1860s, Manet chose the area around Gennevilliers as the background for several pictures. The hilly forest landscape, as it can also be seen in Der Fischer , was shown by Manet - albeit in much greater detail - as early as 1860 in the painting The Students of Salamanca ( Pola Museum of Art ). Here Manet had implemented a scene from the novel The Story of Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage . Instead of a Spanish landscape in which the episode takes place, however, he placed the two people shown in the picture in the landscape near the Île Saint-Ouen. In The Surprised Nymph ( Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires) ), created 1859–1861, Manet painted a female nude in front of a tree-lined river bank. Even if there are different models for this act itself from other painters, the template for the background is again the landscape of the Seine north of Paris.

Art historians see an even closer connection between the painting The Fisherman and two other paintings by Manet. In the background of the painting Breakfast in the Green ( Musée d'Orsay ) there is also a river landscape with a rowing boat and the woman standing in the water assumes a posture similar to the man in the boat in Der Fischer . Rouart / Wildenstein see in Der Fischer a preparatory work for Breakfast in the Green . Other art historians have recognized a close relationship between Der Fischer and the painting Der Fischfang ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ). The painting, also known as L'Île Saint-Ouen, refers to several painterly models and combines the genre of landscape with portrait. In the center of the picture you can see a fishing boat on the Seine and this time three people belong to the boat crew. In addition to a seated man and a standing boy, there is another person who, like the man in Der Fischer, is shown in a side view (here turned to the left) and who also wears gray trousers and a white shirt. He is also just about to pull a fishing net out of the water with his torso bent. For the art historian Sabine Fehlemann, the Wuppertal painting Der Fischer is one of the preliminary studies for the painting Der Fischfang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There is also a pencil drawing colored with watercolors, which is also titled The Fish Catch ( Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen ). This drawing, which was previously in the possession of the painter Camille Pissarro , shows, like the painting The Fisherman in the foreground, a boat with a man bent forward to pull a net out of the water. Although the rest of the drawing differs significantly from the composition of the painting, the similarity in the two images in the execution of the fisherman in his boat has been underlined by several art historians. Anne Coffin Hanson suspected that the drawing might have been a preliminary work for the picture The Fisherman . But it is also conceivable that Manet made the drawing only after the painting was completed. Possibly this drawing was supposed to serve as a template for a print, which was not executed.

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Students of Salamanca , 1860

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Surprised Nymph , 1859–61

  • Édouard Manet:
    Breakfast in the Green , 1863

  • Édouard Manet:
    The fishing (painting), 1861–1863

  • Édouard Manet:
    The fishing (drawing), 1860–1862

Provenance

The painting The Fisherman was one of Manet's works, which were in his studio after his death in 1883 and were inventoried by his godchild Léon Leenhoff . At Manet's estate auction on February 4 and 5, 1884 at the Hôtel Drouot auction house , it was auctioned under the name Marine as number 77 and went to the Parisian collector Malcoud for 210 francs. After that, the picture was for some time in the Notto Collection in Paris and in 1893 it came to the Cabrol Collection in Paris via the art dealer Boussod et Valadon. On June 23, 1900, the painting was auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot auction house. The consignor remained anonymous. On this occasion, the picture went to an unknown bidder for 1070 francs. The painting later found its way into the collection of Gottlieb Friedrich Reber, who lives in Barmen, via Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin . After the First World War, Reber moved to Lausanne. The painting came to the collection of Eduard von der Heydt via Justin Thannhauser's art dealer , who loaned the painting to the Manet exhibition in the Matthiesen gallery in Berlin in 1928 . Eduard von der Heydt gave Manet's Der Fischer to the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal in 1962.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The name Der Fischzug can be found in the catalog of the Manet exhibition in Berlin in 1928, see Galerie Matthiesen: Edouard Manet , p. 24.
  2. ↑ The title Der Fischfang is used for several of Manet's pictures. The Wuppertal painting is so designated in Réunion des Musées Nationaux Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art New York: Manet , p. 74.
  3. ^ Sabine Fehlemann: Von der Heydt-Museum: the paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries , p. 130.
  4. ↑ For example, Rouart / Wildenstein assume in the catalog raisonné that the picture was created there: “Peint dans l Île de Saint-Ouen ...”. See Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet , p. 72.
  5. ^ Gary Tinterow, Henri Loyrette: Origins of Impressionism , pp. 401-402.
  6. ^ Ronald Pickvance: Manet , p. 219.
  7. ^ Réunion des Musées Nationaux Paris and Metropolitan Museum of Art New York: Manet, p. 84.
  8. ↑ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet , p. 72.
  9. ^ Sabine Fehlemann: Von der Heydt-Museum: the paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries , p. 130.
  10. ^ Anne Coffin Hanson: Édouard Manet, 1832-1883 , p. 49.
  11. ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 324.
  12. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses oeuvres. , P. 61.
  13. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses oeuvres. , P. 61.
  14. ↑ Zandvoort is noted as the owner in the catalog for the exhibition Private collection . Zandvoort was Eduard von der Heydt's place of residence at the time. See Galerie Matthiesen: Edouard Manet , p. 23.
  15. ↑ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , p. 72.