The railroad

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Railway (Édouard Manet)
The railroad
Édouard Manet , 1872/73
Oil on canvas
93.3 x 111.5 cm
National Gallery of Art , Washington DC

The railway ( French Le Chemin de fer ) is a picture by the painter Édouard Manet . It was created in 1872/73. It is the final portrait of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent , possibly intended as a tribute to their longstanding relationship.

description

The canvas shows a woman accompanied by a girl (the model was Alphonse Hirsch's daughter ) in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare train station . While the woman ponders out of the picture, the child turns to the events beyond the grid that divides the scene into foreground and background. Beyond the grille, clouds of steam from a passing railroad and the facade of a house can be seen. Juliet Wilson-Bareau was able to prove that the house is the one in which Manet had rented an apartment as a studio since July 1872: Rue Saint-Pétersbourg No. 4, near the Place de l'Europe. In the woman's lap lies a sleeping dog and an open book. To the right of the girl is a grape, which Conzen sees as an indication that the picture was taken in autumn. Courthion points out that the view of the train tracks from the Mallarmés house (Rue de Rome), who was a close friend of Manet, has remained the same to this day.

Reaction of the critics

While Monet , Renoir , Cézanne and other impressionists exhibited in the studio of the photographer Nadar, Manet persistently submitted his pictures to the Salon de Paris . In 1874, Die Eisenbahn was accepted in the Salon together with Polichinelle , where, according to Düchting, it "challenged conservative critics". Jules Claretie asked himself whether Manet would like to win a bet with such a "sketch". The Tintamarre magazine spoke of the "Railway to Charenton" on May 10, 1874; what is meant is a madhouse. Veuillot even suspected a "painterly delirium".

At least there were positive voices: Jules Castagnary ascribed "powerful luminosity" to the picture in the Siècle and Philippe Burty highlighted Manet's influence "on the serious artists of his group" in the newspaper La République française of July 9, 1874. Mallarmé also stood up for his friend in La Renaissance .

Manet's assessment

Manet himself wrote to Antonin Proust about the composition of the picture in 1880 : It is hard to imagine how difficult it is to place a person on a canvas in such a way that he stands in front of you alive and in person. On the other hand, it is child's play to paint two figures that gain their charm from the interlocking of personalities.

Today's rating

For Conzen, the railway plays a central role in the Manets plant. She sees Manet's impressionistic point of view especially in the design of the “summarized background”. It is the view of Victorine Meurent, who also stood as a model for Breakfast in the Green and the Olympics , which "conveys a reflection on the transience and decay of all things".

Provenance

Shortly after completing the painting, it was bought by Manet's baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure , from whom Manet loaned it in 1874 for the exhibition at the Salon de Paris. Faure was the most important collector of his works during Manet's lifetime, of which he acquired more than 60. He sold The Railway in 1881 for 5,400 francs to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who kept it in his portfolio for a few years. In his catalogs he first offered the picture as Enfant regardant le chemin der fer , then as Le pont de l'Europe , later as A la gare St. Lazare and finally as Gare St. Lazare . Durand-Ruel sold the painting on December 31, 1898 for 100,000 francs to the New York sugar manufacturer Henry Osborne Havemeyer . Together with his wife Louisine W. Havemeyer he put together an extensive art collection, which also included 25 paintings by Manet. After her death in 1929, Mrs. Havemeyer bequeathed more than 2,000 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art . The railroad, on the other hand, belonged to a small part of the collection that was shared between the three Havemeyer children. Heir to the painting Die Eisenbahn was the son Horace Havemeyer , who bequeathed the painting to the National Gallery of Art in Washington after his death in 1956 in memory of his mother .

swell

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition catalog Paris, New York 1983: Manet , page 342
  2. ↑ Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen: Splendid legacy , page 355
  3. ↑ All previous owners in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné Volume I No. 207.

literature

  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Juliet Wilson, Bareau: Manet, Monet and the Gare Saint Lazare , Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1998, ISBN 0-300-07510-3 .

Web links

Commons : The Railroad  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files