Three cows in the pasture

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Three cows in the pasture
Édouard Manet , 1873
12 × 21 cm
oil on wood
Private collection

Three cows in the pasture (French: Vaches au pâturage ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet . The 12 × 21 cmpicture, paintedin oil on wood, shows cows in the vicinity of Berck , a northern French town on the Channel coast . It is one of a series of landscape paintings that the artist painted in 1873 during his summer vacation. The painting is in a private collection.

Image description

Photograph of the Saint Jean Baptiste church in Berck. The church tower can be seen in Manet's picture in the background.

At 12 × 21 cm, the picture, which is unusually small compared to other works by Manet, shows a pastoral scene with cows in a pasture and a village in the background. The three cows are lined up next to each other from left to right, each with their heads lowered into the grass. The left cow can be seen from behind with its head turned towards the edge of the picture and its tail stretched up into the sky. The middle cow is shown by Manet in a side view and the right cow is shown in a slightly lateral front view. The fur of the cows is uniformly painted in a brown color, with the right cow also showing some white spots on the head.

A wooden pasture fence can be seen behind the cows and on the left edge of the picture. Individual buildings in the Berck community can be seen behind it. Between the middle and right cow stands the church tower of the Église Saint Jean Baptiste , painted in different shades of gray , the top of which is cut off from the upper edge of the picture. On the left edge of the picture you can see a windmill also in shades of gray, on the right edge of the picture you can find houses with red roof tiles. Above the middle cow, a darkly colored area of ​​the forest is indicated. Over this landscape the artist has painted a sky with white-gray clouds, between which a light blue shines through in only a few places. The willow, painted in different shades of green, occupies the foreground. Manet has indicated the pasture area in short and lively horizontal and vertical lines, without the individual grasses being recognizable. The rest of the picture also shows a fleeting and spontaneous style of painting, so that the impression is more of a sketch than of a finished painting. The painter has signed the picture on the lower right with Manet - an indication of a completed work.

Background to the creation of the picture

Manet painted the picture Three Cows in the Pasture in 1873, a year that was extremely successful for the artist. In the spring of the Salon de Paris he had finally found the desired recognition of the critics with the painting Le Bon Bock ( Das gute Bockbier ) after many years of rejection. His younger painter friends, on the other hand, tended to reject the traditionally painted portrait based on Dutch painting of the 17th century, because they saw Manet as a representative of the new painting. In Drei Khe auf der Pasture - like the other pictures created in Berck - Manet once again devoted himself to a Dutch-looking subject, but once again distanced himself from traditional painting and turned to plein air painting and loose brushstrokes.

Manet spent the summer of the year with family members - his wife Suzanne , his mother and his brother Eugène had traveled with them - on the French Channel coast in Étaples and Berck . The place Berck was divided in 1873 into the center of Berck-Ville and the settlement on the beach Berck-Plage . During these holidays, the artist painted several sea views on the beach and repeatedly selected fishing boats as a motif. In addition, some pictures were taken in the vicinity of Berck-Ville . The most famous of these pictures is the painting The Swallows , which Manet had submitted to the Salon of 1874 but was rejected by the jury. In this picture he shows his wife and mother sitting in the grass on a meadow, while Berck-Ville can be seen in the background . The painter's perspective is very similar in The Swallows and Three Cows in the Pasture . In both pictures the buildings in the background are lined up from the windmill motif on the left over the church tower in the middle to the red roofs on the right edge of the picture. Some cows can also be seen in the picture The Swallows , but they are part of the background here. There is no evidence whether Manet painted Three Cows in the Pasture in front of the picture The Swallows and whether it served as a kind of preliminary study. A very similar view of the place as in the background of Three Cows in the Pasture can be found in the painting Landscape with Village Church , which was probably made elsewhere as early as 1871.

  • Édouard Manet:
    Le Bon Bock , 1873,
    Philadelphia Museum of Art

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Swallows , 1873,
    EG Bührle Collection Foundation, Zurich

  • Édouard Manet:
    Landscape with Village Church , around 1871,
    Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

The landscape on the French Channel coast shows parallels in many ways to the Dutch landscape on the North Sea. It is possible that this relationship between the motifs inspired Manet to create his pictures in Berck. Manet's wife Suzanne was a native of the Netherlands and Manet had visited her homeland several times - most recently in 1872. Dutch painting was also well known to Manet, not least through visits to museums in Amsterdam and Haarlem . Dutch paintings of the 17th century can also be seen as models for Manet's picture. The windmill seen in Three Cows in the Pasture on the left edge of the picture is, for example, a recurring motif in Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen or Salomon van Ruysdael . For the main motif of the picture, the three cows, Paulus Potter has models. More than 200 years before Manet, for example, Potter defined cattle as an independent subject in the painting Vier koeien in de wei ( Four cows in the pasture ).

In Manet's oeuvre there are always images of animals. It is possible that he had been inspired by his friend, animal painter Albert de Balleroy , with whom he had briefly shared a studio. In addition to some depictions of dogs and various still lifes - repeated with fish - animals are mostly marginal figures in portraits of people. Cattle rarely appear in Manet's oeuvre. In the 1860s the painter had repeatedly chosen the Spanish bullfight as a subject. The main motif was not the animals, but the toreros . Only towards the end of his career did Manet choose a single bull as a subject. The picture Young bull on the pasture from 1881 can be read symbolically for the young manhood that Manet, who was marked by illness, was missing in the meantime. In contrast , his painting Three Cows in the Pasture , created in 1873, is devoid of such symbolism.

  • Paulus Potter:
    Four Cows in the Pasture , 1651,
    Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

  • Édouard Manet:
    Young bull on the pasture , 1881,
    private collection

Provenance

Manet kept the painting in his possession for three years before auctioning it off in support of the painter's widow Jean-Adolphe Beaucé . This benefit auction took place on May 11th and 12th, 1876 in the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot and included works by Beaucé and works by artist friends. On this occasion, the doctor Dr. Georges de Bellio , who was friends with numerous painters, Manet's Three Cows in the Pasture . After his death, the doctor's extensive art collection went to his daughter Victorine and son-in-law Ernest Donop de Monchy. A large part of this collection is now a bequest in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris . The painting Three Cows in the Pasture , on the other hand, came to a private collection unknown by name via the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris . On November 5, 2008, the painting was auctioned in the New York branch of Sotheby’s auction house and sold to an anonymous bidder for $ 86,500. In 2013 the picture was offered again at Sotheby's in New York. At an estimated value of 120,000 to 160,000 US dollars, however, it did not find a new buyer. On November 13, 2019, the auction house Sotheby's put the painting up for auction again. For $ 237,500 went to an unknown bidder on this occasion.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German title according to Françoise Cachin: Manet p. 152. In the German translation of Sandra Orienti's catalog raisonné, the picture is labeled with Three Cows in the Meadow : Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, catalog raisonné , p. 84.
  2. ^ French title according to the catalog raisonné by Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Vol. 1, p. 166 No. 191.
  3. ↑ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Vol. 1, p. 166 No. 191.
  4. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , p. 60.
  5. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , p. 64.
  6. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , p. 64.
  7. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , pp. 66–67.
  8. ↑ The painting is missing in the catalog raisonné of Rouart / Wildenstein, but is noted in Orienti as a work ascribed to Manet (catalog no. 420 titled as Landschaft bei Arcachon [?] ). See also the description of the picture on the website of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: [1]
  9. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , p. 67.
  10. ↑ Ronald Pickvance: Manet , p. 245.
  11. ^ French title according to the catalog raisonné by Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Vol. 1, p. 166 No. 191.
  12. ↑ Information in Sotheby's Internet archive at www.sothebys.com
  13. ↑ Description of the painting and auction result on Sotheby’s website