Portrait of Monsieur Pagans
Édouard Manet , 1879
10.4 × 6.9 cm
oil on parchment, drawn on wood
Private collection
The portrait of Monsieur Pagans ( French Portrait de Monsieur Pagans ) is a portrait painting created in 1879 by Édouard Manet . It was originally a decorative vignette, painted in oil on parchment, for the frame of a painted tambourine , which Manet created for a benefit exhibition for flood victims in Spain. Later the vignette was detached from the tambourine and mounted on a 10.4 cm high and 6.9 cm wide wooden board. The picture shows the Spanish singer, guitarist and composer Lorenzo Pagans . It is in a private collection.
To the creation of the picture
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On October 15, 1879, the Río Segura in the Spanish province of Murcia overflowed its banks and caused a severe flood disaster in which around 1,000 people died and extensive property damage occurred. People in Paris also took an active part in the news from Spain, and well-known writers such as Victor Hugo , Alphonse Daudet and Émile Zola appealed for donations. The magazine La Vie Moderne , which was only founded in the spring of 1879, invited various artists to a benefit exhibition on this occasion, at which painted tambourines were to be shown. The painters involved in the exhibition included Giuseppe de Nittis , Carolus-Duran , Giovanni Boldini , Jean-Jacques Henner , Léon Bonnat , Federico Madrazo , Martín Rico y Ortega , Augustin Théodule Ribot , Alfred Stevens , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Manet.
A total of six painted tambourines by Manet are known. Some of these have been completely preserved, with the parchment of the round striking surface stretched onto a clamp ring as a tensioning frame. On the sides there are bells and, on one object, colored fabric ribbons are attached. Manet's friend Antonin Proust acquired two of these tambourines, dancer and majo and singer in the café-concert . Lorenzo Pagans bought two more tambourines, each showing a Spanish dancing couple. On one of these tambourines (catalog raisonné Rouart / Wildenstein No. 320) there was the portrait of Monsieur Pagan as an attached vignette on the outer wooden frame . The tambourine was later dismantled. The round picture with the Spanish dancers is framed and the portrait of Monsieur Pagan is mounted on a wooden panel.
Image description
The portrait of Monsieur Pagans is one of the smallest pictures that Manet executed as an oil painting. The black painted wooden panel has a height of 10.4 cm and a width of 6.9 cm. On it is the portrait as a medallion in a painted frame. A red border surrounds the portrait, which is followed by a gold-colored, circumferential line at a short distance. The black of the wooden panel can be seen in between. At the bottom of this double-barreled frame, the gold-colored line touches the inner red frame, with gold-colored lines sometimes extending over the red line - a sign that the gold-colored line was added later. It is possible that the red frame was made by Manet himself; the gold frame was certainly added by an unknown hand after his death when the parchment painting was transferred to the wooden panel.
The actual portrait is executed as a shoulder piece in frontal view against a gray background. The portrayed Lorenzo Pagans has his head slightly tilted to the right shoulder and looks directly at the viewer with his dark eyes. The left half of the face is largely in the shadow area, while the right half of the face is illuminated by a light source outside the image. The face including the ear is painted here with a pink complexion. Pagans wears a thick, broad, dark-blonde mustache over his closed mouth. Pagans wears a black jacket and underneath a white shirt with a stand-up collar. He has tied a blue tie around his collar. Shirt and tie extend to the bottom of the picture. Pagans wears a black hat that covers most of the forehead and from under which the short dark hair peeks out. The hat is almost the same height as the face, with the side still protruding over the head. Equipped with two pompons, it has a Spanish-folkloric effect and underlines the origin of the sitter.
Portrait of a musician friend
The tenor, pianist and guitarist Lorenzo Pagans from Catalonia had been known to Manet since the 1860s. Manet must have seen and heard the musician during one of his performances in Paris. Around 1871–1872, Edgar Degas , a friend of Manet, painted the famous double portrait of Lorenzo Pagan and Auguste de Gas ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris). In this picture Degas shows the guitarist and singer Pagans at a house concert. From around this time Pagans frequented the salons of Parisian artists and musicians. Manet's wife Suzanne Manet , who was also a pianist, ran such a salon . Pagans and Suzanne Manet may have made music together on such an occasion. With the portrait of Monsieur Pagan and its apparently folkloric appearance, Manet took up his own earlier pictures from the 1860s. In his painting The Spanish Singer ( Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York), Manet, like Degas later, painted a man playing guitar and singing. In the portrait of Monsieur Pagan , however, the musician is not seen performing, but Manet shows him in the way that was customary in photographic business card portraits , which were very popular at the time the picture was created.
Provenance
Édouard Manet probably sold the picture directly to the Spanish singer Lorenzo Pagans portrayed in the picture. In his sales book Manet noted the sale of one painted tambourine each for 1879 and 1882 and named "P." specified. As a possible buyer of this abbreviation, in addition to Pagans, Manet's friend Eugène Pertuiset , who also owned works by the painter, is theoretically possible . The two tambourines with the motif of the Spanish dancers were on view in Manet's memorial exhibition in 1884, where Lorenzo Pagans lent them. It is unclear when and by whom the portrait of Monsieur Pagan was separated from the associated tambourine. It is possible that the heirs of Pagans initially sold the main motif of the tambourine depicting the Spanish dancers and kept the portrait of Lorenzo Pagans as a souvenir.
The portrait of Monsieur Pagans later came to the art dealer Georges Wildenstein , who had branches in Paris and New York. The picture was then in the collection of Mrs. Gilbert Kahn from New York, who owned the picture for several years before selling it to Liz Wolven in 1984. The next owner was Mrs. HH Rogers, who also lives in New York. The portrait that she owned was put up for auction on February 18, 1988 at Christie's New York auction house . The new owner, unknown by name, acquired the painting for $ 22,000 on this occasion. On May 8, 2014, the picture reappeared in an auction. In the New York branch of the Sotheby’s auction house , an unknown bidder bought the picture for $ 167,000.
The portrait of Monsieur Pagan was rarely seen in public. After the Manet exhibition in 1884 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the picture was shown twice in exhibitions in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. 1933-1934, the Pennsylvania Museum of Art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art ) exhibited the portrait of Monsieur Pagan as part of the Manet and Renoir exhibition . The picture was also shown in an exhibition at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts in 1936 .
literature
- Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet . Skira, Milan 2005, ISBN 88-7624-472-7 .
- Émile Bergerat : Souvenires d'un enfant de Paris . E. Fasquelle, Paris 1912.
- Mariantonia Reinhard-Felice (eds.), Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Malcolm Park: Manet meets Manet . Schwabe, Basel 2005, ISBN 3-7965-2202-5 .
- Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Édouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975., Volume I, Paris 1975.
- Charles F. Stuckey, Juliet Wilson-Bareau : Edouard Manet . Exhibition catalog Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, Art Life Ltd, Tokyo 1986.
- Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez, The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Emile Bergerat: Souvenires d'un enfant de Paris , Volume 3, p. 131.
- ^ Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , p. 288.
- ↑ The ribbon and bells are still on the tambourine dancer and majo (Rouart / Wildenstein No. 323). See Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , p. 288.Bells can also be found on the tambourine singer in the café-concert (Rouart / Wildenstein No. 322), see Reinhard-Felice, Wilson-Bareau, Park: Manet meets Manet , p. 48.
- ↑ Tinterow, Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , S. 503rd
- ^ Stuckey, Wilson-Bareau: Edouard Manet , p. 160.
- ^ Charles F. Stuckey, Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Edouard Manet , p. 160.
- ↑ Tinterow, Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , S. 503rd