Doctor Materne
Doctor Materne , also head of a man , (French: Portrait du docteur Materne ) is a picture by Édouard Manet drawn with pastel chalk on canvas . The 56 cm high and 35 cm wide picture shows the doctor Paul Materne, with whom Manet was treated around 1880. The picture belongs to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris .
Image description
Manet has portrayed Doctor Materne with pastel chalk on canvas. It shows the doctor close up as a bust portrait in half profile. While the facial features are finely worked out and a monochrome gray background is painted behind the head, the lower part of the canvas remains almost unprocessed. Only a white primer can be seen here.
Doctor Materne looks directly at the viewer with his brown eyes. The skin of the face changes between white and pink tones. The black head hair is coiffed into a kind of middle parting and leaves the forehead area completely free. Particularly noticeable is the sitter's long black beard, which extends below to above his chest. In particular, the area of the dark blue jacket is only sketchy and individual lines of chalk are visible. The picture is neither signed nor dated.
background
The picture was taken around 1880 when Manet was being treated by Doctor Materne. Paul Materne, to whose patient Emperor Napoleon III. had heard, worked at that time as a doctor in the Etablissement Hydrothérapique des Docteur Joseph-Marie-Alfred Béni-Barde. In this hydrotherapy clinic , Manet hoped to cure the paralysis in his left leg from which he had suffered since the late 1870s. The applications brought Manet a temporary improvement in symptoms and alleviation of his pain, but a permanent cure could not be achieved. Until his death in 1883, Manet therefore consulted a number of other doctors, including Doctor Marjolin, Doctor Siredey and the doctor and art collector Georges de Bellio . Of all these doctors, Manet only portrayed Doctor Materne.
Due to his illness, Manet found it difficult to stand in the last years of his life and the work on large oil paintings gave him particular effort. He therefore often resorted to drawing with pastel chalk, which enabled him to work quickly. Most of these pastel pictures show portraits of women and only a few portraits of men in this technique are known. The portrait of Ernest Cabaner, also executed in pastel, was created around the same time as the portrait of Doctor Materne . The poet Cabaner, who is friends with Manet, is represented in a similar way to the doctor Paul Materne. Both pictures are about the same size, executed as chest portraits in front of a monochrome background and in both portraits only the primer can be seen in the lower part of the canvas. In the portrait of Cabaner, Manet also used the signature “Manet” to underline that despite the sketchy execution, he considered the work to be completed.
Provenance
The pastel Doctor Materne was one of the works of Manet that were in his studio after his death in 1883 and were inventoried by his godchild Léon Leenhoff . At Manet's estate auction on February 4 and 5, 1884 at the Hôtel Drouot auction house , it was auctioned under the name Tête d'homme as number 95 and went to the Parisian collector Gabriel Thomas. Then the painter and art collector Étienne Moreau-Nélaton acquired the picture. In 1907 he donated large parts of his art collection to the French state, including Manet's famous painting The Breakfast in the Green . On this occasion, the picture of Doctor Materne came into the state collections and was initially kept in the Louvre . It has been part of the collection of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1986.
literature
- Julius Meier-Graefe : Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912.
- Geneviève Monnier: Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée d'Orsay: Pastels du XIXe siècle . Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris 1985, ISBN 2-7118-2-010-6 .
- Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36050-5 .
- Adolphe Tabarant : Manet et ses oeuvres . Gallimard, Paris 1947.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ German title according to Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, works , S. 58th
- ^ French title according to Geneviève Monnier: Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Musée d'Orsay: Pastels du XIXe siècle p. 146.
- ^ Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 326.
- ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses oeuvres. , P. 390.