Alice Legouvé in the armchair

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Alice Legouvé in the
Édouard Manet armchair , around 1875
26.5 × 28 cm
oil on canvas
Armand Hammer Museum of Art , Los Angeles

Alice Legouvé in an armchair , also called Portrait of Mademoiselle Legouvé or Bildnis Alice Legouvé (French: Portrait d'Alice Legouvé dans un fauteuil , Portrait d'Alice Legouvé or Tête de femme ), is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet from around 1875 . It shows the shoulder piece of a friend, Alice Legouvé (also spelled Lecouvé), who can be seen in several of Manet's pictures. The 26.5 × 28 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, belongs to the collection of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles .

Image description

The picture shows the portrait of Alice Legouvé. Even if one of the French titles speaks of the head of a woman ( Tête de femme ), the portrait is executed as a shoulder piece and shows not only the head but also parts of the upper body. In the almost square painting, Manet has focused the head in the center of the picture, while the shoulders of the upper body have moved a little to the left edge of the picture in order to reveal the upholstered back of an armchair or sofa on the right edge.

Alice Legouvé's upper body is shown frontally. She is wearing a gray dress and has a black fringed scarf over it. The stand-up collar of a white blouse protrudes from the neck, in the small section of which is a flower with red blossoms and green foliage. The sitter does not look at the viewer, but with her wide-open brown eyes has a point in view to the right outside the picture. Your complexion shows different shades of pink with individual highlights on the chin and tip of the nose. The small mouth with the closed red lips looks friendly. The right ear of the sitter is almost completely visible and only the upper tip is covered by her hair. Manet carefully worked out the details of the hairstyle. She wears her auburn hair pinned up and decorated with a red ribbon. Above the forehead, the hair falls in the form of a center parting far forward to the eyebrows. The other hair is braided and draped upwards like a tower at the back of the head. The red ribbon fixes the hair and is tied in a bow behind the head, part of which is visible behind the right ear.

On the right edge of the picture, behind and next to the left shoulder, the upholstered backrest of a chair can be seen. The fabric is kept in a light beige, on which individual floral motifs in green and red can be seen. These floral motifs correspond with the blossom in the section of the sitter. The background of the picture is kept almost monochrome in shimmering shades of beige. The picture is signed "EM" lower right.

background

Édouard Manet: The Laundry , 1875

Alice Legouvé (also spelled Lecouvé) was initially the model of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens before she met Édouard Manet. In Manet's painting Die Krocketpartie ( Städelsches Kunstinstitut , Frankfurt am Main) from 1873 Manet depicted Alice Legouvé and Alfred Stevens, along with two other people, enjoying their leisure time in the garden. She then appears in Manet's painting The Laundry ( Barnes Foundation , Philadelphia) in 1875 , where she can be seen in a garden next to a small child. There are also two portraits in which Manet shows Alice Legouvé's upper body with bare chest ( Buste de femme , both private collection, dating unclear). Even if Manet took a direct look at the naked Alice Legouvé, there is no evidence that he also had an intimate relationship with her. The dating of the painting Alice Legouvé in the armchair is also unclear . Manet's biographer Adolphe Tabarant gives 1875 as the year of creation, i.e. the same year as for the painting The Laundry . Other authors have joined this, but another year of creation is possible.

Provenance

The picture was in his studio when Manet died in 1883. At the auction of his estate on February 4th and 5th, 1884 in the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot , the collector porter bought it for 200 francs . The picture then came into the collection of the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche and was later offered by the Parisian art dealer Bernheim-Jeune . The next owner is the entrepreneur Alexander Lewin from Guben . From 1933 onwards he deposited significant parts of his art collection abroad and loaned the picture to the exhibition Schilderijen van Delacroix tot Cézanne en Vincent van Gogh in the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam from 1933–1934 and showed it in 1938 in the show Honderd Jaar Fransche Kunst in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam . Lewin was forced to leave Germany as a Jew in 1938 and went into exile in Switzerland. He owned the picture Alice Legouvé in an armchair until his death in 1942 and left it to Countess Hedwig Bopp von Oberstadt, who lived in Switzerland. She sold the picture in 1945 for 70,000 Swiss francs to the Zurich entrepreneur Emil Georg Bührle . The portrait of Alice Legouvé was shown together with the Bührle Collection in an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1958 . In 1960, Bührle's heirs transferred numerous works of art from his collection, including several pictures by Édouard Manet, to the EG Bührle Collection Foundation . The painting Alice Legouvé in the armchair, however, was sold by the heirs. It later appeared in the collection of Chicago entrepreneur Leigh B. Block. In 1980 he and his wife founded the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art in Evanston (Illinois) . However, he did not donate the Manet picture to the museum, but had it auctioned on May 20, 1981 in the New York branch of the Sotheby’s auction house. The picture went to the entrepreneur Armand Hammer for US $ 175,000 , who initially made it available to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for a few years before joining the collection of the Armand Hammer Museum of Art , which he founded in 1990 .

literature

  • Françoise Cachin : Manet . DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-2791-9 .
  • Hans Jucker, Theodor Müller, Eduard Hüttinger: Collection Emil G. Bührle . Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich 1958.
  • Lukas Gloor , Sylvie Wuhrmann: Chefs-d'ouvre de la Bührle collection . La Bibliothèque des arts, Lausanne 2017, ISBN 978-2-88453-207-5 .
  • Julius Meier-Graefe : Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912.
  • Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36050-5 .
  • Sandra Orienti: The complete paintings of Manet . Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1985, ISBN 0-14-008651-X .
  • Susan Barnes Robinson: The French impressionists in southern California: paintings, sculptures, and prints in public collections; a guidebook and catalog . Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles 1984.
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Adolphe Tabarant : Manet, histoire catalographique . Ed. Montaigne, Paris 1931.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The title Alice Legouvé in the armchair (last name in the spelling Lecouvé) is noted in Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet , Vol. II, p. 18. The picture in Hans Jucker, Theodor Müller, Eduard Hüttinger: Emil G. Bührle Collection , p. 100 is designated as a portrait of Mademoiselle Legouvé . The title Bildnis Alice Legouvé can be found in Françoise Cachin: Manet , p. 153. The French term Portrait d'Alice Legouvé dans un fauteuil (last name in the spelling Lecouvé) comes from Sandra Orienti: The complete paintings of Manet . P. 105. Portrait d'Alice Legouvé is the designation in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , p. 198 and in Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 320 Tête de femme is noted.
  2. ↑ The size information comes from the 1958 catalog of the Bührle Collection, which owned the painting at the time. There are various deviating information in the literature, which may also be based on conversion differences to American units of measurement. Information from Hans Jucker, Theodor Müller, Eduard Hüttinger: Emil G. Bührle Collection , p. 100.
  3. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet, histoire catalographique , no.229 .
  4. ↑ The painting had the lot number 34 at the auction and was titled Tête de femme . See Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 320.
  5. ↑ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Vol. I, p. 198.
  6. ↑ Lukas Gloor, Sylvie Wuhrmann: Chefs-d'ouvre de la collection Bührle , p. 175.
  7. ↑ Hans Jucker, Theodor Müller, Eduard Hüttinger: Emil G. Bührle Collection , p. 100.
  8. ^ Rita Reif: Auctions . Article in the New York Times on March 27, 1981.
  9. ↑ Information on the auction at http://artsalesindex.artinfo.com
  10. ^ Susan Barnes Robinson: The French impressionists in southern California , p. 50.