Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets

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Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets (Édouard Manet)
Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets
Édouard Manet , 1872
Oil on canvas
55.5 × 40.5 cm
Musée d'Orsay , Paris

Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets ( French Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes ) is a picture painted in oil on canvas by Édouard Manet . It has a height of 55.5 cm and a width of 40.5 cm. It shows Berthe Morisot , a painter who was friends with Manet and who was his preferred model between 1868 and 1874. Art critics consider the portrait to be one of the most important portraits in the artist's oeuvre. Using this picture as a template, Manet created an etching and two lithographs in which he varied the motif. The oil painting is in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Image description

The painting shows the portrait of Berthe Morisot. The painter, who is friends with Manet, is executed as a chest piece - the head and upper body with shoulders and upper arms can be seen. The portrayed woman in dark clothes stands out against a light background. The background could be a drawn curtain that appears in various shades of white and gray. The transition to a dark area can be seen on the right edge of the picture. In the upper right corner the painter has signed and dated the picture “Manet 72”.

Berthe Morisot wears a black dress with a small V-shaped neckline from which a linen shirt peeks out and a small piece of skin can be seen. In the middle of the breast a small bouquet of violets adorns the lower end of the neckline. To match the dress, the sitter has put on a tall black hat, which is also known as a "mourning hat". Behind the head a wide hat band falls down to the right, on the left there are thin strips that hang down. There are also wide black chinstraps tied around the neck. Individual strands of curly auburn hair peek out from under the hat pulled low over the forehead.

Your face is illuminated from the left side of the picture, so that your right half of your face shines in bright light, while the left half is in the shadow area. A clear dividing line between light and dark can be seen on the bridge of the nose. Her complexion is light and the contours are partially blurred with white paint. A pendant adorns the left ear, which is barely covered by the hair. A counterpart on the right is indicated with light dots of color. The mouth is closed and the lips are a pale pink shade. The noticeably large dark eyes are directed at the viewer.

The French essayist Paul Valéry was married to a niece of Berthe Morisot and knew the family-owned portrait of the painter firsthand. His descriptions of the painting on the occasion of Manet's 100th birthday in 1932 have been quoted repeatedly. In Berthe Morisot's eyes he sees a “staring into space” that expresses “not being there”. For him, her eyes reveal “absent-mindedness” and “being very far away”. At the sight of the delicacy of the depiction in Manet's painting Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets , Valéry felt reminiscent of Vermeer's painting The Girl with the Pearl Earring . For Valéry it is “poetry” and Manet's most important portrait.

Manet's reproductions of the subject

After completing the painting, Manet made various reproductions of the motif, which suggests a certain satisfaction with the execution of the picture. Presumably he first created an etching , the prints of which show the portrait reversed. Here, as in the following prints, Manet completely dispensed with the background with the curtain. Instead, he varied the hat and clothing of the portrayed in the etching by transforming the painting's almost monochrome black into a surface with irregular light areas. In addition, the half of the face in the shadow area is provided with an exaggeratedly dramatic shadow, as the art historian Anne Coffin Hanson noted. In the etching, Berthe Morisot is placed in the picture with his body leaning forward at a slight angle. In addition, the motif has a drawn frame at the edges.

Furthermore, Manet created two chalk lithographs based on the painting. The first version, also known as the black version , may have been created from a photograph of the painting. This is supported by the fact that the contours of the lithograph and the painting are almost congruent and that the print is not a reversed representation. This first lithograph shows Berthe Morisot's black clothes in stark contrast to the light area of ​​his face and is very similar to the original of the painting. The main differences are in the effect of shadows on the face: while half of the face is in the shadow in the painting, only small shadows under the nose and mouth can be seen in the lithography. In the second lithograph, also known as silhouette , Manet traced the outlines of the black areas of the painting and left the areas light. Only the hats hanging down to the left and right of the face show gray shaded areas. In addition, the eyes and a shadow area on the neck are clearly highlighted as black areas. The etching and both lithographs date from 1872 to 1874 and are not signed. The prints of the lithographs were first made by the printer Lemercier in 1884, i.e. after Manet's death. The earliest prints of the etching were also published posthumously in 1890.

  • Édouard Manet:
    Portrait of Berthe Morisot (etching) , 1872–1874, etching

  • Édouard Manet:
    Portrait of Berthe Morisot (black version) , 1872–1874, chalk lithograph

  • Édouard Manet:
    Portrait of Berthe Morisot (silhouette) , 1872–1874, chalk lithograph

Berthe Morisot as Manet's model

Manet had met Berthe Morisot in the Louvre in 1867 , when she was in the process of copying a work by Rubens and their mutual friend Henri Fantin-Latour was introducing the two to one another. From then on, Manet and Morisot were close friends. Since 1864 she exhibited pictures in the Salon de Paris , but found herself repeatedly in artistic crises with self-doubt. For some time she saw an important advisor in Manet, who was nine years her senior. In addition, she was a frequent guest at the Manet soirees , which were held weekly by the painter's wife and mother. Between 1868 and 1874 she also sat as a model for Manet.

First she painted Manet in the group portrait The Balcony , a picture related to a work by the Spanish painter Goya . In this picture she is sitting on a balcony in a white dress with a fan as a prop. She also wears a white dress in the painting Portrait of Berthe Morisot (The Rest Period) from around 1870 , in which Manet portrayed her sitting on a sofa. The white dress of Eva Gonzalès in the portrait of Eva Gonzalès from 1870 is very similar. She was Manet's only official student and as such he shows her sitting at the easel painting a flower still life. It is noticeable that Manet did not depict his girlfriend Berthe Morisot as a painter in any of his portraits. In the painting Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets, there is no prop that indicates her as a painter. The art historian Manuela B. Mena Marqués suspects that there was a kind of jealousy in the relationship between Eva Gonzalès and Berthe Morisot.

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Balcony , 1868,
    Musée d'Orsay, Paris

  • Édouard Manet:
    Portrait of Berthe Morisot (The Rest) , 1869,
    Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence

  • Édouard Manet:
    Portrait of Eva Gonzalès , 1870,
    Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin and National Gallery, London

In the portraits of Berthe Morisot painted between 1872 and 1874, Manet always depicted the sitter in black clothing. Only the painting Berthe Morisot in mourning clothes is known to have been mournful as the occasion for these clothes . In all of the other images, the black clothing suggests Berthe Morisot's personal taste on the one hand, and Manet's predilection for black clothing can also be seen on the other.

Manet had repeatedly painted pictures with Spanish motifs, especially in the 1860s, including portraits of women in dark or black clothing. These include, for example, the paintings Spaniard with a black cross or Angelina, both of which were created between 1860 and 1865. Like Berthe Morisot, the woman portrayed in the painting Angelina is later portrayed in The Balcony behind a balcony railing with a fan. In this picture there is also the effect of the face illuminated from one side, which Manet took up again a decade later in the painting Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets . Manet had studied his preference for dark or black tones with the Spanish painter Velázquez , whom he greatly admired.

When Manet painted Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets in 1872 , the sitter had just returned from a study trip from Madrid on which she was accompanied by the painter Zacharie Astruc , who was also a friend of Manet . The portrait was probably created in only two sessions and the previous trip was certainly a topic of conversation, especially since Manet himself had visited Madrid in 1865. The art historian Françoise Cachin saw Berthe Morisot's expression "curiosity and dismay, sunken attention for the artist who painted it - a profound complicity, as if they were in lively conversation". The French writer Georges Bataille assumed that Manet saw in Berthe Morisot “both the gifted painter and the beautiful woman”, whom he was allowed to admire for her “enchanting intelligence”.

After the portrait of Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets , Manet created several other portraits of Berthe Morisot in black clothing until 1874. These include, for example, Berthe Morisot with pink shoes from 1872, Berthe Morisot lying down from 1873 and Berthe Morisot with a fan from 1874. In the same year Berthe Morisot married Manet's brother Eugène . After that, Manet no longer created a picture of her. The painting Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets is the masterpiece of this series for the Danish art historian Mikael Wivel . He sees in this portrait a declaration of love from the painter to his model.

  • Édouard Manet:
    Berthe Morisot in mourning clothes , 1874,
    private collection

  • Édouard Manet:
    Spanish woman with a black cross , around 1860–1865,
    Dallas Museum of Art

  • Édouard Manet:
    Angelina , around 1860–1865,
    Musée d'Orsay, Paris

  • Édouard Manet:
    Berthe Morisot with pink shoes , 1872,
    Hiroshima Museum of Art

  • Édouard Manet:
    Berthe Morisot lying down , 1873,
    Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

  • Édouard Manet:
    Berthe Morisot with a fan , 1874,
    Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

Provenance

The painting Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets was initially in the collection of Manet's friend Théodore Duret , whom the painter had met in Madrid in 1866. Both shared a penchant for Spanish art and it is hardly surprising that Duret opted for this Spanish-style portrait. On March 19, 1894, Duret was forced to auction a large part of his art collection for financial reasons. On this occasion, Berthe Morisot, shown in the picture, acquired the painting. Morisot died just a year later and the portrait went to her daughter Julie Manet . She kept the picture until her death in 1966 and repeatedly loaned it to exhibitions. It then passed into the possession of her son Clément Rouart, who also regularly made the picture available for exhibitions. After his death in 1992, his children kept the picture for a few years before selling it to the French state in 1998 for 80 million francs . The funds for this came from the Fonds du Patrimoine , the Fondation Meyer , the China Times Group and the Japanese daily Nikkei . The painting has been exhibited at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1998. On the occasion of the purchase of the painting, the newspaper Liberation quoted the historian Marc Fumaroli , who described the picture as the Mona Lisa of the 19th century.

literature

Web links

Commons : Berthe Morisot with bouquet of violets  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Described as curtain by Paul Valéry in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 , p. 334. Described in the original as rideau gris ( gray curtain ) in Paul Jamot, Paul Valéry: Exposition Manet , XIV.
  2. ↑ a b Manuela B. Mena Marqués: Manet en el Prado , p. 476.
  3. ^ German translation in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 . 1984, p. 335.
  4. ^ German translation in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 . 1984, p. 334.
  5. ↑ Valéry does not name the picture, but describes it as “... that head of a young woman by the hand of Vermeer that hangs in the museum in The Hague”, quoted in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson -Bareau: Manet: 1832-1883 . 1984, p. 335. In the original the passage reads: “... cette tête de jeune femme par Vermeer, qui est au Musée de La Haye.” Quoted from Paul Jamot, Paul Valéry: Exposition Manet, XV.
  6. ↑ “The portrait of which I spoke is poetry.” Quoted from Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 . 1984, p. 336. “In the entire work there is nothing higher than a certain portrait depicting Berthe Morisot and dated 1872.” German translation quoted from Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 . 1984, p. 334. A different translation is offered on the Musée d'Orsay website: “No other work comes close to the portrait of Berthe Morisot from 1872.” quoted from [1] . In the original the passage reads: “Je ne mets rien, dans l'œuvre de Manet, au-dessus d'un certain portrait de Berthe Morisot, date de 1872.” quoted from Paul Jamot, Paul Valéry: Exposition Manet, XIV.
  7. ↑ "In fact he was so pleased with himself that he based two lithographs and an etching on it." Quotation from Mikael Wivel: Manet , p. 110.
  8. ^ Anne Coffin Hanson: Edouard Manet. 1832–1883 , p. 123. Juliet Wilson also sees the possibility that the etching was made before the lithographs. See Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Edouard Manet, das graphic work , p. 114.
  9. ^ A b Anne Coffin Hanson: Édouard Manet. 1832-1883 , p. 123.
  10. ^ Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Edouard Manet, the graphic work , p. 114.
  11. ^ Anne Coffin Hanson: Edouard Manet. 1832-1883 , p. 125.
  12. ^ A b c Maryanne Stevens: Manet, portraying life , p. 182.
  13. ↑ Manuela B. Mena Marqués: Manet en el Prado , p. 475.
  14. ↑ On January 24, 1874, Berthe Morisot's father died. See Maryanne Stevens: Manet, portraying life , p. 182.
  15. ↑ A photograph is known that shows Berthe Morisot standing in a long dark (black?) Dress. Unknown date, Carte de visite, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris. Reproduced, for example, in Maryanne Stevens: Manet, portraying life , p. 93.
  16. ↑ See for example Manuela B. Mena Marqués on the painting Angelina : Manet en el Prado , p. 456.
  17. ↑ On the role of Velázquez as Manet's role model, see in detail Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain in Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting , pp. 203-257.
  18. ^ Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832-1883 , p. 336.
  19. ^ Georges Bataille: Manet , p. 100.
  20. ^ Mikael Wivel: Manet , p. 110.
  21. ↑ "an unreserved declaration of love from the painter". See Mikael Wivel: Manet , p. 110.
  22. ↑ For example, the painting was loaned to the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1932 for the Manet retrospective and in 1961 to the Musée Cantini in Marseille. See catalog Paris 1932 p. 40 and catalog Marseilles, no.14.
  23. ↑ Vincent Noce: Une Joconde au musée d'Orsay, Berthe Morisot de Manet a coûte 80 millions de Franc , article in the newspaper Liberation of November 5, 1998.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on May 22, 2016 in this version .