Chez Tortoni

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Chez Tortoni (Edouard Manet)
Chez Tortoni
Édouard Manet , 1878-1880
Oil on canvas
26 × 34 cm
Stolen since 1990, before
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum , Boston

Chez Tortoni or The Journalist (French: Le Journaliste ) is a painting by the painter Édouard Manet . The picture, painted in oil on canvas around 1878–1880, is 26 cm high and 34 cm wide. The painting shows a man sitting in a Parisian café. It is one of a series of depictions in which Manet portrayed people in Parisian bars. The title Chez Tortoni (German: Beim Tortoni ) points to the famous Parisian café-restaurant Tortoni , but it is not possible to clearly identify the location of the scene. The alternative title of the picture, The Journalist, also suggests a certain occupation of the person depicted, although there are no clear indications for this. The painting was in the possession of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990 . After a spectacular art theft , the whereabouts of the picture is unclear.

Image description

The painting shows an elegantly dressed man sitting in a Parisian café. Manet has moved the man, whose body is cut off from the lower edge of the picture, as a half-figure in the right half of the picture. He can be seen from the front, has turned his body slightly to the left of the picture, placed his hands on the table in front of him and tilted his head a little downwards. He looks directly at the viewer with his dark eyes. Like large parts of the picture, his face is painted with rough brushstrokes. The light falling in from the left gives his rosy complexion white highlights on the right. His left half of his face, which is in the shadow, shows dark areas in reddish brown. A blond mustache twisted slightly outward can be seen above the closed lips. His scalp hair, on the other hand, which can be seen above the left ear, is dark in color. On his head he wears a tall black cylinder that is pulled far over his forehead. He is also dressed in a black coat or jacket. The white stand-up collar protrudes from the neck and the white cuffs of the shirt can be seen on the sleeves.

There are two pieces of furniture in the picture. Part of the back of a chair can be seen behind the man to the right. In gold, black, white and a shade of red, the painter has created a varied surface. At the bottom of the picture from the left corner to the center of the picture is the round top of a dark table. White paper lies on the table in front of the man. He put his hands on it. He seems to be holding the paper with his left hand, while in his right hand he is holding a pencil, the tip of which is touching the paper. The hands are rather rough. Hardly any details can be seen in the left hand and it is more of an indefinite area. The right hand clearly grasps the pen, individual fingers are visible, but the execution is still very sketchy. It remains unclear what kind of paper is on the table. A blank sheet of paper or a notebook would be possible to write down thoughts or to make a sketch. It is also conceivable that there is a newspaper in front of the man in which he ticks things off or adds comments. Although the man leads the pen to the paper, he is not about to write anything down - Manet has portrayed him when he looks up for a moment.

The spatial situation in which the man finds himself is unclear. The round table in front of it is typical of a Parisian café at the end of the 19th century and can be found in such establishments to this day. A glass on the table at the left edge of the picture, presumably filled with an alcoholic drink, also indicates such an establishment. The background, on the other hand, does not provide any clues for a local assignment. On the right side there is a wide black stripe. Possibly this is a passage to an unlit room. A door, a cupboard or a curtain could also be indicated here. Directly behind the painter there is a surface painted in various shades of brown - a wall or the corner of a room would be conceivable here. The left part of the background, which consists of two light surfaces separated by a dark stripe, is particularly puzzling. The area on the left edge of the picture is predominantly painted in different shades of gray, the second area towards the center is much lighter in shades of beige and pink. There is also a yellow stripe horizontally in the center of the image. These two areas offer some scope for interpretation. A mirror surface would come into consideration here, which reproduces the room in a distorted manner, but a window pane is also conceivable, possibly with a curtain in front of it. Ultimately, it is not even clear whether the man is sitting in a café or in front of it. The window pane could also be seen from the outside and the wall behind the man could represent a house wall.

The painting is signed “Manet” lower left. There is also a sequence of digits that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum read as "75". Art historians such as Rouart / Wildenstein doubt, however, that the year 1875 could be meant here.

background

The title Chez Tortoni (German: Beim Tortoni ) refers to the Tortoni café-restaurant on 22 Boulevard des Italiens in Paris. In the 19th century it was a popular meeting place for journalists, stockbrokers, writers and artists. Manet frequented this eatery and met here repeatedly for lunch with the poet Charles Baudelaire . It is therefore quite possible that during one of his visits to Tortoni he saw the man with a cylinder depicted in the picture at a table next door and later made the painting in the studio from memory or from sketches made on site. Corresponding sketches are not known, however, and the picture title Chez Tortoni does not come from Manet. The picture was initially called Man Sitting at a Table , before various Manet biographers such as Étienne Moreau-Nélaton and Paul Jamot / Georges Wildenstein referred to the picture as Le Journaliste (German: The Journalist ) in the first half of the 20th century . In doing so, they dispensed with an exact place name and instead emphasized the possible occupation of the sitter. However, neither the name nor the profession of the sitter have been passed down. Despite his distinctive facial features, the man has not yet been identified. The profession cannot be clearly identified either. A man who makes notes on a piece of paper with a pencil in his hand can do different jobs. If the picture was actually inspired by a visit to the Tortoni, a journalist, a stockbroker and a writer who take notes or a painter who makes a sketch would come into question.

Manet's biographer Adolphe Tabarant claimed that the painting did not show a scene in Tortoni, but was based on motifs from the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes . However, he did not provide any justification for this claim. Jamot / Wildenstein's assumption that the portrayed person was the painter Georges Chenard-Huché (1864–1937) is equally unfounded . If the picture was taken in 1880, Chenard-Huché would have been 16 years old. The man seen in the painting, on the other hand, seems to be significantly older. In addition to the profession and identity of the sitter and the location of the scenery, the year in which the picture was created is also unclear. The indistinctly painted digits next to the signature Manet in the picture , which were read as 75 , could indicate a year of origin 1875. However, this is rejected by several art historians. In view of Manet's oeuvre, 1875 appears rather early, as the painter did not deal intensively with the depictions of café and pub scenes until the late 1870s.

Manet's cafe scenes

Between 1877 and 1881 Manet painted a series of several paintings and pastels depicting scenes in cafés or similar establishments. He took up again a theme that goes back to a demand of the poet Charles Baudelaire that contemporary painters should depict modern life ( La vie modern ) in their works . After Manet had previously painted pictures of the opera, the racetrack or holiday stays by the sea, he described scenes in the café house pictures that he experienced every day as a stroller and guest in his immediate neighborhood. Unlike some of his painting colleagues from the Impressionist circle, he had little interest in depicting the popular places for excursions outside the capital. For his pictures, Manet mainly chose the places in Paris where he himself frequented and met his friends. In his pictures there are depictions of the Café Guerbois , the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes , the Brasserie de Reichshoffen or the Père Lathuile .

One of the earliest pictures in this series of cafés is the painting The Plum from around 1877 . Here a woman is sitting alone in a café in front of a glass of plum liqueur. It is known from visitors to Manet that the painter had an elongated marble table in his studio to re-enact various café scenes there. Accordingly, no real café was used as a model for Die Pflaume , although he had probably previously observed people in corresponding poses in a café. Manet depicted another woman in the café around 1880 in pastel femme lisant . The picture is also known as a reader in Nouvelle Athènes , which creates a possible local reference to the café of the same name. The motif of this reader is very similar to the man in Chez Tortoni . This woman is also half-length in the right half of the picture, on the left is the table with an alcoholic drink and she is busy reading a newspaper. The background, however, differs significantly. The reading woman clearly shows an interior space. While most of the people portrayed by Manet in cafés are not known by name, there is no doubt about the identity of the person portrayed in the portrait sketch of George Moore in the café (1878–1879). The Irish writer George Moore was a member of Manet's circle of friends and has repeatedly visited Manet's studio, where the unfinished portrait was also created. In this picture Manet dispensed with an attribute that could identify Moore as a writer. Instead, he placed a glass on the table, as can also be seen in Chez Tortoni .

The many possible interpretations of the background of Chez Tortoni can be seen especially in Manet's café-house scenes with several people. In the painting Le Bouchon from 1878, Manet describes an outside space that is quite possible as a background in Chez Tortoni . Here the background is very sketchy , as in Chez Tortoni , but a tree trunk protruding through the image in the foreground clearly makes this image an open-air scene. In addition, Manet created a series of pictures in which several people are shown in the interior of bars. For several motifs that Manet has located in the Brasserie de Reichshoffen, he tried out different compositions and varied the background, which sometimes opens onto a stage and sometimes shows a window draped with curtains ( in the café ). A real café also served as a model for the pastel A Café at the Place du Théâtre-Français´ , created around 1881 . Here he first made a pencil sketch in the café and then worked on the pastel picture in the studio. The picture shows the interior of the café with a waiter standing at the counter and a large mirror in the background. In this picture there are round coffee house tables that resemble the table in Chez Tortoni . The conclusion of this series is the painting Bar in den Folies Bergère from 1881 , which Manet submitted to the Salon de Paris in 1882. Manet shows a bar girl in front of a mirrored wall, the surface of which reflects the sitter, a customer and what is going on in the room.

Manet used a few props in his pictures with café-house motifs, which he combined at will. So the table and the glass from the picture Chez Tortoni also appear in other pictures. Whether based on a sketch made on site or entirely constructed in the studio, whether inside or outside, whether mirror or window - all these possible alternatives as a background for Chez Tortoni can be found in other works by Manet. Despite the title of the picture, the sketchy execution of the picture leaves open the question of a precise location of the motif.

Provenance

It is not known who Manet sold or gave away this painting to. The authors Paul Jamot and Georges Wildenstein assumed that the painter Georges Chenard-Huché, whom they took to be the sitter, was also the first owner of the picture after Manet. However, there is no proof of this. The first known collector of the image was in Saint-Germain-en-Laye living Alphonse Can . He had the picture auctioned in Paris in December 1920. The art dealer Dikran Khan Kelekian appeared there as the buyer . He loaned the picture in March 1921 for an exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute in New York. The picture changed hands again on November 30, 1922 at an auction organized by the American Art Association in the Hotel Plaza in New York . The buyer was the American painter Louis Kronberg , who acted on behalf of the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner . Ms. Gardner placed the picture in her Boston museum in the so-called Blue Room below another work by Manet, the portrait of the artist's mother. On March 18, 1990, a spectacular theft occurred in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum when burglars dressed as police officers stole several works of art from the collection. In addition to important works by Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Vermeer , the thieves also stole works that were valued by experts as less high. This also includes Manet's Chez Tortoni . This is all the more surprising given that other top works in the collection, such as works by Sandro Botticelli , Raffael and Tizian , were left unmolested by the thieves. Despite a reward of 5 million US dollars offered by the museum, none of the works of art has yet been found.

literature

  • Philip Hendy (Ed.): European and American paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum . Trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 1974.
  • Paul Jamot, Georges Wildenstein : Manet, Catalog critique . Van Oest, Paris 1932.
  • Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, catalog raisonné . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36050-5 .
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Adolphe Tabarant: Manet, histoire catalographique . Édition Montaigne, Paris 1931.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The "75" is based on information from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum. Rouart / Wildenstein consider a year 75 to be doubtful: “Selon le musée le tableau est signé Manet 75, le 75 est douteux”. See Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet , Volume I, p. 254.
  2. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet, histoire catalographique. P. 340.
  3. ↑ Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, works. P. 108.
  4. ^ The essay Le Peintre de la vie modern by Charles Baudelaire first appeared in the newspaper Le Figaro in 1863 .
  5. ↑ For example, at Père Lathuille, in the open air (1879, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai) or Buveuse de Bocks (1878–1879, Burrell Collection, Glasgow) show such scenes.
  6. ↑ These include Im Café-concert (1878, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), Ecke im Konzertcafé (1878–1879, National Gallery, London), Beer Waitress (1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and Im Café (1878, Oskar Collection Reinhart “Am Römerholz”, Winterthur).
  7. ^ Philip Hendy: European and American paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. P. 152.
  8. ^ Philip Hendy: European and American paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. P. 152.
  9. ↑ Information on art theft on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum website