Woman with dogs

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Woman with Dogs
Édouard Manet , around 1862
96 × 74 cm
oil on canvas
Private collection

Woman with dogs ( French La femme aux chiens ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet from around 1862 . The picture, 96 cm high and 74 cm wide, painted in oil on canvas shows a woman with two dogs in front of an indefinite background. The painting belongs to the artist's early work and is influenced by works of Spanish baroque painting . It is in a private collection.

Image description

In the center of the painting, a knee portrait of a standing woman with two large dogs on her right side. When viewed from the front, her body appears slightly rotated to the right edge of the picture and her gaze is directed forward to the viewer. The woman is dressed all in black. With a long skirt, she wears a matching, long-sleeved jacket that is closed by buttons at the front. She has covered her head with a black cloth, the ends of which are tied under her chin. Her dark hair, combed back, shows under the scarf. Manet worked out the facial features painstakingly. The woman has a fair complexion with reddish cheeks, her lips are closed and her eyes are wide open. While her left hand is hidden behind her back, she is holding a dog leash with her right hand. The right arm protruding from the wide jacket sleeve goes straight down and, like the hand, is only sketchy.

There is a brown and a black dog in the lower left corner. Above all, you can see their two large heads with long hanging ears, while their bodies are largely cut off from the lower and left edges of the picture. Like women, the dogs look at the viewer of the picture. On the left edge of the picture next to the woman's upper body there is a baby carriage with a red blanket over the basket and a blue cloth over the hood. The silhouette of a slightly stooped person can be made out vaguely behind it. In the background above there are some vertical brushstrokes that may indicate houses in a village. A blue sky can be seen behind and above the woman's head. Between the woman and the right edge of the picture there is an indefinite area in gray and beige tones, in which the canvas partially shines through. A tree protrudes from this seemingly unfinished surface, its branches and leaves filling the upper right corner. The author Viola Hildebrand-Schat sees a “discrepancy between narrative accuracy and hint” in the differently executed image areas. Manet's signature can be read in the lower right corner , but it does not come from the artist, but was affixed there by his widow, Suzanne Manet , after his death .

An early work with Spanish models

The painting Woman with Dogs is one of Manet's early works, although the exact date of creation is not known. Various authors, for example the art historian Françoise Cachin , dated the picture to the year 1858, but without giving a reason for this. References to other paintings by Manet and Spanish models of Baroque painting suggest that it was created around 1862.

In the Second Empire there was a real Spanish fashion, which was not least triggered by the Empress Eugénie , who came from Spain . A highlight was the Paris guest performance in 1862 by a group of Spanish dancers from the ballet of the Madrid Opera. In the same year Manet painted both the ensemble and portraits of individual stars such as the dancer Lola de Valence and the dancer Don Mariano Camprubi. The woman portrayed in the painting Woman with Dogs , whose identity is not known, could have come to Paris with the group of Spanish dancers.

Another indication of the possible year of origin is a painting from the workshop of Diego Velázquez . In 1862 the French state bought the painting Philip IV as a hunter as an independent work by Velázquez and exhibited it in the Louvre (today in the Musée Goya , Castres). At the time, it was considered the second version of the version of the same name in the Museo del Prado , but it is now attributed to Velázquez's workshop. Manet admired Spanish painting and especially the work of Velázquez. In Woman with Dogs , Manet seems to adapt the motif of Philip IV as a hunter and transform it into a female counterpart. In both pictures, the person portrayed is in the center of the picture with his body slightly turned to the right, the left hand behind the back, the right hand stretched down, dog or dog in the lower left corner of the picture and trees as a background motif. These similarities may be coincidental, but suggest a chronological classification around the year 1862.

Manet's exploration of Spanish painting began in the late 1850s with pictures such as The Absinthe Drinker , in which references to works by Velázquez can also be seen. In the painting Boy with Dog , which Manet created around 1860, he clearly refers to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and anticipates the motif of a woman with dogs . Portraits of Spanish women can be found next to Lola de Valence, for example, in Spanish woman with a black cross (around 1865, Dallas Museum of Art ) or in Angelina (around 1860–64, Musée d'Orsay , Paris).

  • Diego Velázquez (workshop):
    Philip IV as a hunter

  • Édouard Manet:
    boy with dog

  • Edouard Manet:
    Lola de Valence

  • Édouard Manet:
    Spaniard with a black cross

  • Édouard Manet:
    Angelina

Provenance

The painting Woman with Dogs was one of Manet's works, which were in his studio after his death in 1883 and which 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 La femme aux chien and went to the Parisian dealer and collector Gaston-Alexandre Camentron. After that it was in the JJ Cowan's collection in Edinburgh . Then it went to the United States , where it was bought by lawyer Frank Hadley Ginn from Cleveland . He made it available on loan for the French Art Since Eighteen Hundred exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1929 . After his death in 1938, his son Francis Ginn inherited the picture. He made the picture available to the Wildenstein Gallery in New York for a Manet exhibition in 1948. The next owners are the collector couple Mr. and Mrs. Louis Moorman from San Antonio , who loaned the painting in 1960 for the exhibition From Gauguin to Gorky at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . The other known owners were John MacCamish in 1967 and the New York gallery Hirschl & Adler in 1970. Subsequently, the picture was in an American private collection unknown by name. On June 25, 2001, the painting went up for auction at Phillips' London auction house for £ 210,000 to an unknown bidder. In 2007, the painting hit the headlines when Lawrence B. Salander, owner of the New York gallery Salander-O'Reilly , mortgaged it to his landlord on account of rent debts and stated the alleged value of the painting at more than 10 million US dollars. After the gallery went bankrupt in 2010, the picture went to a private collection, once again unknown by name. On February 3, 2016, the painting went up for auction in the London branch of Sotheby’s auction house, fetching £ 413,000. A little later, the Russian collector Inna Bazhenova appeared as the new owner, who loaned the picture for the exhibition Manet - Seeing in Hamburg in 2016 .

literature

  • Françoise Cachin : Manet . DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-2791-9 .
  • Julius Meier-Graefe : Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912.
  • Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Manet - Seeing: The view of modernity . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-7319-0325-3 .
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Ed.): From Gauguin to Gorky in Cullinan Hall . Exhibition catalog, Houston 1960.
  • Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36051-3 .
  • Daniel Catton Rich: The Spanish Background for Manet's Early Work in Parnassus, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 1-5, February 1932, College Art Association, ISSN 1543-6314.
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Wildenstein Galleries (Ed.): A loan exhibition of Manet for the benefit of the New York Infirmary . Wildenstein, New York 1948.
  • Adolphe Tabarant : Manet et ses Œuvres , Gallimard, Paris 1947.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The term woman with dogs can be found in Françoise Cachin: Manet , p. 148; La femme aux chiens is the title in the catalog raisonné by Rouart / Wildenstein, Vol. I, No. 49.
  2. ↑ Viola Hildebrand-Schat: Manet's early works in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Manet - Seeing: Der Blick der Moderne , p. 118.
  3. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses Œuvres , p. 235.
  4. ^ Françoise Cachin: Manet , p. 148.
  5. ^ Daniel Catton Rich: The Spanish Background for Manet's Early Work .
  6. ^ Daniel Catton Rich: The Spanish Background for Manet's Early Work .
  7. ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 325. Deviating from this, Meier-Graefe describes the picture in the same book on p. 27 as La marchande de chiens (dog dealer).
  8. ^ Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (ed.): From Gauguin to Gorky in Cullinan Hall . No. 36.
  9. ↑ James Barron, Patrick McGeehan: Big Dreams, Big Expenses: In a Lavish Town House, an Art Gallery in Trouble , New York Times article, October 29, 2007
  10. ↑ Information about the auction on the website of the auction house Sotheby’s
  11. ↑ Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Manet - See: Der Blick der Moderne , p. 117.