Eugène Manet

Edgar Degas: Eugène Manet , oil sketch (detail), around 1875

Eugène Manet (born November 21, 1833 in Paris , † April 13, 1892 in Paris) was a brother of the painter Édouard Manet and the husband of the painter Berthe Morisot . He was a model for various impressionist artists .

Life

The Manet family originally came from Gennevilliers near Paris and had inherited property there. Eugène Manet's grandfather Clement Manet was mayor of the municipality. The father Auguste Manet became a judge in Paris and headed the personnel department in the Ministry of Justice. The mother Eugénie-Désirée Manet was born as the daughter of the French diplomat Joseph Fournier , who worked as a consul in Gothenburg . From this marriage came the three sons Édouard (born 1832), Eugène (born 1833) and Gustave Manet (born 1835).

Eugène Manet completed his military service after completing school and then began studying law. Unlike his father, however, he did not have any professional ambitions. Due to his inherited wealth, he was not dependent on the exercise of a profession. Instead, he had various artistic interests. From 1849 he received piano lessons from Suzanne Leenhoff , who was to marry his brother Édouard in 1863. Eugène Manet tried his hand at painting and traveled to Italy with his brother Édouard in 1853 to study original works of art in Florence and Venice . While Édouard Manet became a well-known painter, the work of Eugène Manet received little attention and only a few of his pastel paintings have survived. In the 1860s, Eugène Manet repeatedly modeled his brother. He appears next to his mother in the group picture Music in the Tuileries Garden , was a model for one of the two male figures in the painting Breakfast in the Green and was portrayed as a beggar in A Philosopher . In 1873, Édouard Manet created the double portrait Am Strand , which shows his wife Suzanne together with Eugène on the beach at Berck on the Normandy coast . During this family stay by the sea, Eugène Manet met his future wife, the painter Berthe Morisot , in nearby Fécamp , and painted with her.

It is not known exactly when Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot met. His brother Édouard had met Berthe Morisot in 1868 while copying in the Louvre and had maintained a close artist friendship with her ever since. She modeled a number of pictures for him and repeatedly asked for his advice as a painter. Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot may also have known each other since the late 1860s. The relationship between them, on the other hand, did not develop until the 1870s. Eugène Manet was involved in organizing the first group exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874 and was particularly responsible for the hanging of the works and the catalog. Berthe Morisot showed her pictures in this exhibition, while Édouard Manet did not take part in the exhibition. Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot were married on December 22, 1874 in the Church of Notre Dame de Grâce de Passy . Eugène Manet's occupation is listed in the marriage certificate as “landowner”. His wife did not bear the name Manet publicly and continued to call herself Berthe Morisot as an artist. Edgar Degas presented a portrait of Eugène Manet as a wedding present . It shows him in the Normandy countryside , where the couple got engaged in the summer of the previous year. In 1875 Degas created another portrait of Eugène Manet, but it was only executed as a sketch.

After the wedding, Eugène Manet and his wife initially lived with their mother-in-law at 7 rue Guichard in Passy . After her death, the couple moved to 9 avenue d'Eylau (now avenue Victor-Hugo ) in 1876. In 1875 they both traveled to England. Berthe Morisot painted a number of pictures on the Isle of Wight , including the painting Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight - one of the first portraits of her husband. They also stayed in London and visited the National Gallery there . In contrast to his contemporary Felix Bracquemond , Eugène Manet supported his wife's artistic work. When the art critic Albert Wolff criticized the work of Berthe Morisot in the newspaper Le Figaro in 1876 , Eugène Manet toyed with the idea of ​​challenging the author to a duel . However, he hardly followed his own artistic development. In 1877, for example, he turned down an invitation from Edgar Degas to participate in the third group exhibition of the Impressionists.

On November 14, 1878, their daughter Julie Manet was born as the couple's only child. In Berthe Morsiot's paintings Eugène Manet and his daughter in Bougival from 1881 or Eugène Manet and his daughter in the garden from 1883, she shows her husband as a loving father playing with his daughter. Julie Manet wrote a diary in her youth, which her children later published. As a result, many details from her parents' Parisian artistic environment became known. From 1881 Eugène Manet and his wife had a house built in Paris' Rue de Villejust (today Rue Paul-Valéry), whose rental income contributed to the family's maintenance and in which they later moved into an apartment themselves. In the summer of 1881 the couple rented a country house at 4 rue de la Princess in Bougival . In 1882 the family traveled to Italy, where they visited Genoa , Pisa and Florence. The return journey took them via Nice . In the following years the couple made several trips, which took them to the French Mediterranean coast, but also to Jersey , Belgium and the Netherlands .

Eugène Manet also helped prepare the Impressionists' group exhibition in 1882. In 1883 his brother Édouard died, in 1884 his brother Gustave. Together with his wife and other people, Eugène Manet organized the memorial exhibition for his brother Édouard in 1884 at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts .

In addition to Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, the Manet-Morisot couple counted other artists such as Claude Monet , Gustave Caillebotte , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and James McNeill Whistler to their circle of friends. They also frequented literary circles and were friends with writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé , Théodore Duret , Henri de Régnier , Teodor de Wyzewa and Édouard Dujardin . Eugène Manet published the semi-biographical novella Victimes! In 1889 .

From 1891 Eugène Manet suffered from health problems. The family, who had previously spent their summer holidays in a country house in Mézy-sur-Seine , bought Le Mesnil-Saint-Laurent Castle in nearby Juziers in 1891 . Eugène Manet died on April 13, 1892 at the age of 59 in Paris. He is buried on the Cimetière de Passy in the grave of his brother Édouard. His wife Berthe Morisot and his sister-in-law Suzanne Manet later found their final resting place in this communal grave.

gallery

Eugène Manet is depicted in numerous paintings, including paintings by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot:

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  Édouard Manet: Music in the Tuileries Garden

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  Édouard Manet: Breakfast in the countryside

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  Édouard Manet: A philosopher

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  Édouard Manet: On the beach

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  Edgar Degas: Portrait of Eugène Manet

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  Berthe Morisot: Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight

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  Berthe Morisot: Eugène Manet and his daughter in Bougival

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  Eugène Manet and his daughter in the garden

Publications

• Victimes! , A. Staub, Clamecy 1889.

literature

• Nancy Locke: Manet and the Family Romance. Princeton University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-691-05060-0 .
• Jill Berk Jiminez: Dictionary of artists' models . Fitzroy Dearborn, London 2001, ISBN 1-57958-233-8 .
• Julie Manet , Sybille A. Rott-Illfeld: The diary of Julie Manet. A youth under the spell of the Impressionists . Knaus, Munich and Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-8135-3694-7 .
• Ingrid Pfeiffer: Impressionists . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2008, ISBN 3-7757-2078-2 .
• Charles P. Stuckey, William P. Scott: Berthe Morisot, Impressionist . Hudson Hills Press, New York 1987, ISBN 0-933920-03-2 .

Web links

Commons : Eugène Manet  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Charles P. Stuckey, William P. Scott: Berthe Morisot, Impressionist , p. 69.