Woman with umbrella (Manet)

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Woman with an umbrella
Édouard Manet , 1872
48.2 × 40 cm
oil on canvas
Private collection

Woman with an umbrella , also woman with a parasol ( French La Femme à l'Ombrelle ), is a painting by Édouard Manet created in 1872 . The picture is 48.2 cm high and 40 cm wide and painted in oil on canvas . Manet presumably portrayed Alice Legouvé, a friend of his, in this painting. She is shown half-length as a strolling woman with a parasol, a motif that Manet and other artists of his time took up repeatedly. The painting Woman with Umbrella is in a private collection.

Image description

In the painting Woman with Umbrella Manet shows a half-length portrait of a young Parisian woman. She stands face to face with the viewer and looks at him directly with wide open dark eyes. Her face looks a bit full with reddish chubby cheeks and an implied double chin. Their varied incarnate is striking . The skin on the face and neck appears in graduated color variations from white to light brown and gray to pink and red tones. This gives the face a sculptural look and the suggested highlights make it look lively. While the eyes appear more like simplified dark points, the closed lips are more finely drawn and convey a friendly impression with a slight smile. Above her forehead, her dark hair is styled in a slightly frayed pony . The rest of the hair is pinned up to the back and is adorned with a dark hat with a small light bow.

The depicted woman is wearing a dark dress with long, wide sleeves. A pattern that extends from the chest to the shoulder and is indicated by light polka dots can be part of the dress or a scarf over it. A simple, upright white collar can be seen on the neck; A salmon-colored bow closes the neckline at the front. In her hands she holds the handle of a parasol in front of her left breast, the rod of which is placed over her shoulder and which opens behind her. Her hands are very rough and the individual fingers are difficult to make out. She may also be wearing light brown gloves, which would have been quite common for a walk in the 19th century. The open parasol takes up almost the entire background. Its surface, which alternates between light and dark blue, is only interrupted by thin, diagonal black lines that indicate a structure, but do not reveal details such as the mechanics of the screen. In the upper and lower left corners, small green-yellow areas indicate a garden or park-like environment. The picture is neither signed nor dated.

The model

It is not known for certain who modeled Manet's painting Woman with an Umbrella . Since the painter mostly renounced professional models, he often portrayed family members and friends. Due to the lack of similarities, however, his wife Suzanne and his future sister-in-law Berthe Morisot , whom he painted more often during this time, are leaving. His pupil Eva Gonzalès also shows little external similarities with the person depicted in the picture Woman with an umbrella . The art historian John Richardson therefore suggested Alice Legouvé as a likely model for the painting. Other authors, such as the authors of Manet's catalog raisonné Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein , followed this assumption .

Manet had probably met Alice Legouvé through the painter Alfred Stevens , for whom she repeatedly stood as a model and whose lover she was probably. In the group picture Die Krocketpartie ( Städelsches Kunstinstitut , Frankfurt am Main) from 1873, Manet portrayed the painter Stevens together with Alice Legouvé along with two other figures. Also in a garden, the painting The Laundry ( Barnes Foundation , Philadelphia) was painted in 1875 , in which Alice Legouvé can be seen with a child. In the same year Manet also painted Alice Legouvé in an armchair ( Armand Hammer Museum of Art , Los Angeles), in which the greatest physiognomic similarities to the facial features of the portrayed can be seen in woman with umbrella .

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Croquet Game , 1873

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Laundry , 1875

  • Édouard Manet:
    Alice Legouvé in an armchair , 1875

The motif of the woman with an umbrella in Manet and other artists

Manet, who always had a great interest in the fashionable appearance of Parisian women, devoted himself to the image of the woman with an umbrella as early as the 1860s. For example, he shows women with a parasol as an indispensable prop in paintings such as Music in the Tuileries ( National Gallery , London and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane ) and women running ( Cincinnati Art Museum ). A parasol is also an important accessory in the famous painting The Balcony ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris). In the 1870s, there are works such as The Swallows ( Foundation EG Bührle Collection , Zurich) or the work Im Wintergarten ( National Gallery , Berlin) painted in the studio , in which sunshades are part of the composition. One of Manet's last paintings shown at the Salon de Paris is The Spring ( J. Paul Getty Museum , Los Angeles), in which Jeanne Demarsy, portrayed from the side, has placed the parasol over her shoulder in a similar way to Alice Legouvé in the woman with umbrella .

  • Édouard Manet:
    Women in the race , 1864-1865

  • Édouard Manet:
    The balcony , 1868–1869

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Swallows , 1873

  • Édouard Manet:
    In the Winter Garden , 1879

  • Édouard Manet:
    The Spring , 1881

Manet's painter colleagues have also repeatedly implemented the motif of the woman with an umbrella in their pictures. In 1867, for example, Pierre-Auguste Renoir created the Lise with the parasol ( Museum Folkwang , Essen) as a full-body version of the subject. By Claude Monet , there is the 1870 created holiday motif on the beach at Trouville ( National Gallery , London), looking at the women with umbrellas protecting from the sun. Monet also created a full-length version of the subject in 1875 with Camille Monet and son Jean on the Hill ( National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC). Variations on the theme can also be found in Monet's two paintings Woman with a Parasol (both Musée d'Orsay, Paris) from 1886 . Another full-length portrait of a woman with an umbrella was painted by Henri Gervex in his picture Mlle V. (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), who portrayed the demi-world lady Valtesse de la Bigne in a garden. A great motif resemblance to Manet's wife with an umbrella exists above all in Renoir's painting of the same name, created in 1873 (private property). Both the image section and what is shown directly looking at the image viewer show a clear match. Details in the clothing, such as the stand-up collar and the small bow in front of the neckline, show a closeness between the images. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether Renoir was familiar with Manet's painting a year earlier, or whether the two painters came to very similar statements independently of one another.

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Lise with the Parasol , 1867

  • Claude Monet:
    On the Beach at Trouville , 1870

  • Claude Monet:
    Camille Monet and Son Jean on the Hill , 1875

  • Henri Gervex:
    Mlle V. , 1879

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Woman with an Umbrella , 1873

Provenance

The first known owner of the picture was the Paris-based margarine manufacturer and art collector Auguste Pellerin who owned a number of Manet's paintings. Around 1912 the painting came into the collection of the Hungarian banker Baron Adolf Kohner in Budapest. He sold the picture in 1930 to the art dealer Wildenstein & Company , which kept it in their New York branch for several years. In 1947 the Los Angeles-based film producer William Goetz and his wife Edith A. Mayer Goetz bought the woman with an umbrella from Manet. After the death of William Goetz in 1969 and the death of his wife in 1987, the picture was put up for auction on November 14, 1988 in the New York branch of Christie's auction house, where it was purchased by an unknown bidder. The painting was put up for auction again in 2019 and was offered on May 14 at the Sotheby’s auction house . On that occasion, it went to an also unknown collector for $ 1.7 million.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ German title according to Françoise Cachin : Manet , p. 152.
  2. ↑ The painting is referred to as a woman with a parasol in Wilhelm Uhde: Edouard Manet: Paintings and Drawings , p. 112.
  3. ^ French title based on Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , p. 160.
  4. ↑ The dimensions 48.2 x 40 cm come from the information provided by auction house Sotheby's for the auction of the painting in 2019. Deviating there is the size specification 52 x 32 cm in the catalog raisonné by Rouart / Wildenstein from 1975, p. 160.
  5. ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet, histoire catalographique , p. 223.
  6. ↑ John Richardson's thesis on Alice Legouvé as a possible model is noted in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , p. 160.
  7. ^ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné .
  8. ↑ Information about the 2019 auction on the website of the auction house Sotheby’s .