Le petit Lange

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Le petit Lange
Édouard Manet , around 1861
116.5 × 72 cm
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

Le petit Lange is a child portrait created around 1861 by the French painter Édouard Manet . The 116.5 × 72 cmpicture, paintedin oil on canvas, shows the life-size portrait of a five-year-old boy from the Lange family, who are friends with the artist. In his dark tone-on-tone painting , the portrait goes back to Spanish models and is also influenced by Antoine Watteau's Gilles in the Louvre . Due to its sketchy execution in some areas, the painting, which belongs to Manet's early work,anticipates the artist'slater, Impressionist work phase. The painting Le petit Lange is in the collection of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe .

Image description

In the painting Le petit Lange Manet portrays a boy about five years old as a full- length figure. The sitter stands with slightly open legs in front of an undefined background consisting of various shades of brown and gray-green accents. The boy wears a black, round, wide-brimmed hat that is slightly pushed back. The sitter is dressed in a typical black and brown Sunday suit, consisting of knee breeches and a paletot . Under this paletot, the boy wears a white shirt, the cuff and sleeve base of which are clearly visible on the right arm. The white shirt collar is also turned over the collar of the Paletot. Over the black shoes, gray gaiters with a black button placket cover the lower legs.

The artist has only indistinctly worked out the left arm. The right hand, angled slightly forward, holds a typical children's toy for the time the picture was created. In addition to a slightly curved, braided riding crop, the boy's hand includes a vermilion bridle. However, the picture does not show the boy playing - for example with a hobby horse - but in a motionless pose.

The main light source throws the light directly from the front onto the child's face so that the background of the image appears brightest directly behind the head, but no shadows emerge. A second, weaker incidence of light is directed from the top left onto the child's foot area, whereby shadows falling to the right behind become visible in this area. While large parts of the painting are rather sketchy with fleeting brushstrokes, the boy's face is more finely worked out. In this way, the artist reproduced the black, parted hair with a light silky sheen and gave the full cheeks and nose a rosy tint. Under the small closed mouth with its reddish lips there is a small dimple. The child seems to be looking directly at the viewer with his dark brown eyes. Various authors describe the child's gaze as serious to melancholy.

The background of the picture has led to different interpretations. The author Gert Reising suspects a curtain behind the boy. The art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau sees in her analyzes, due to the shimmering green tones in the lower area of ​​the picture, the possibility that the picture Le petit Lange is an overpainting of another painting or that Manet painted over a fragment of a larger canvas. However, since the painting has never been examined by X-rays, these assumptions have not yet been confirmed.

Identity of the sitter

Dedication and signature of the painting

The identification of the boy portrayed caused difficulties for art historians for a long time, which made dating and classification into Manet's oeuvre difficult. In the lower left corner of the picture, Édouard Manet provided a dedication above the signature éd. Manet himself gave a first indication of the identity of the child depicted. There is à Mme h. Lange (German: for Frau h. Lange ) to read, whereby the art historian Juliet Wilson-Bareau has pointed out that the h could also be an n . Various authors conclude from the dedication that the sitter was a son of this Ms. Lange, without being able to clarify the meaning of the individual letters before the surname. The name Lange can also be found in the Manet family's photo album. On a carte de visite , under a photograph of a seated man, there is the handwritten note Lange . The Manet biographer Adolphe Tabarant also asked Manet's alleged son Léon Leenhoff about the artist's personal environment. According to Leenhoff, Madame Lange was one of the guests in the salon , which Manet's mother and his wife ran weekly on Tuesdays. Another clue about the Lange family emerges from the correspondence between Manet's friend and biographer Théodore Duret and the Danish art collector Wilhelm Hansen . When Hansen became interested in the painting Le petit Lange in 1916 , Duret wrote to him that the boy portrayed was one of Mr. Lange's sons. After Duret, Lange was one of Ferdinand de Lesseps's collaborators in the planning of the Suez Canal , the construction of which began in 1859. According to information from the Wildenstein Institute, which published the Manet catalog raisonné published in 1975, the boy's father is Daniel Adolphus Lange. Research into the creation of the painting Le petit Lange on the occasion of the Manet exhibitions in Paris and New York 2002/2003 and Madrid 2003 did not reveal any further results on the exact identity of the child, so that it has not yet been clarified which of Daniel Adolphus Lange's sons in the painting Le petit Lange is depicted.

Édouard Manet:
Boy with a sword
1860–61

Dating of the picture

The exact date of origin of the painting Le petit Lange is not known. A reference point for dating is the photograph of a child in Manet's photo album, which is right next to Mr. Lange's carte de visite. This child's photo does not show the Lange family's son, but an unknown girl. With the year 1861 on the back, the author Juliet Wilson-Bareau assumes that Mr. Lange's Carte de Visite also dates from this year. A closer relationship between the Manet and Lange families at this point in time is therefore obvious.

In order to date Le petit Lange , art historians also draw motivic parallels to two other paintings by Manet. Juliet Wilson-Bareau and Manuela B. Mena Marqués see thematic overlaps both in the painting Boy with a Sword from 1860–61 and in the representation of the child in the painting The Old Musician from 1862.

Role models from Spanish painters and Watteau

At the beginning of the 1860s, there was a distinct Spanish fashion in Paris. In addition to the Empress Eugénie from Spain, a Spanish theater group contributed to this, which delighted the audience with its folkloric performances.

References to Watteau's Gilles in Manet's The Old Musician (detail)

During this time, Manet copied works by his favorite Spanish painter, Diego Velázquez, in the Louvre . Other paintings by the Spaniard, such as the portrait of Infante Don Carlos , were known to Manet as reproductions from the publication of the Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles by Charles Blanc . Velázquez's influence on Manet is particularly evident in the painting Boy with a Sword from 1861 . The sitter in this picture wears Spanish fashion of the 17th century and refers directly to Velázquez in his tone-on-tone painting. The parallels to the portrait Le petit Lange in the boy’s direct gaze at the viewer and in the type and color of clothing are striking . In both paintings a boy dressed in black can be seen in front of a brown background, even if the boy with a sword is generally painted more traditionally than Le petit Lange . In this tone-on-tone painting, art historians like Gert Reising not only see the influence of Diego Velázquez, but also speak, like Jan Lauts, of the “Spanish black” in Manet's color scheme.

In addition to Velázquez, there are various child portraits by Francisco de Goya that may have inspired Manet to paint Le petit Lange . In the portrait of Victor Guye from 1810, for example, a boy dressed in black is also portrayed against a dark background. The child's direct look at the viewer can also be found in this portrait. The depiction of Pepito Costa y Bonelis by the same painter shows - also against a brown background - a boy in a posture similar to that of Le petit Lange . In this painting there are also children's toys as decorative accessories, including a wooden horse, which Manet also referred to in Le petit Lange with the bridle and riding crop. Another striking feature of the Pepito Costa y Bonelis is the red accent color of the feathers on the hand-held hat, which Manet repeats in the red bridle of Le petit Lange .

As a model for Le petit Lange , art historians consider the painting Gilles by the French painter Antoine Watteau , which Manet studied at the Louvre, alongside the Spanish artists . In addition to the frontal life-size image and the almost identical posture, art historians see thematic overlaps in the reproduction of the hat and the melancholy facial expression. In the portrait of a boy dressed in white in the painting The Old Musician from 1862, Manet refers to Watteau's Gilles even more clearly than in Le petit Lange .

  • Diego Velazquez:
    Infante Don Carlos
    1626-27

  • Francisco de Goya:
    Victor Guye
    1810

  • Francisco de Goya:
    Pepito Costa y Bonelis
    around 1813

  • Antoine Watteau:
    Gilles
    1717-1719

Manet's portraits of children

The painting Le petit Lange , like the other children's portraits from around 1860, is part of Manet's early work, although the sometimes sketchy style of painting refers to Manet's impressionist pictures from the 1870s and 1880s. According to Le petit Lange , children in Manet's work are mostly part of a larger picture composition or are executed as half-profile portraits. In the painting Music in the Tuileries Garden from 1862, two children playing can be found as a lively element in a representation of Parisian society. The work Der Pfeifer from 1866 shows not only Japanese but also Spanish influences. As in Le petit Lange , the boy dressed in a uniform is painted as a life-size figure in front of an undefined background. Intended for the Paris Salon , the picture is executed with greater accuracy overall.

In the 1870s, Manet, influenced by his friend Claude Monet , increasingly turned to the Impressionist style of painting. An example of this is the picture Little Jacques Hoschedé in the Garden from 1878. As in Le petit Lange , the boy depicted is also the son of a befriended family. What is striking about this depiction of a child in a natural setting is the artist's more colorful palette and the overall loose brushwork. The closest motivic proximity to Le petit Lange is shown in a picture painted only two years before Manet's death. The full-length portrait of Henry Bernstein as a child , created in 1881, looks like a negative of Le petit Lange due to the child's white sailor suit . A five-year-old son of a family friend, the later playwright Henri Bernstein, is portrayed . As in Le petit Lange , this painting features an undefined, brownish background, the black hat framing the head, an almost identical posture and a motionless pose with a direct look at the viewer.

  • Children playing in music in the Tuileries Gardens,
    1862

  • The Piper
    1866

  • Little Jacques Hoschedé in the garden
    1878

  • Henry Bernstein as a child
    1881

Child portraits of Manet's contemporaries

How much other artists were influenced by Velázquez and Goya during Manet's lifetime can be seen in the children's portraits The Artist 's Daughter, Marie-Anne von Manet's friend Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, and the portrait Robert de Cévrieux by John Singer Sargent . Each time dressed in dark, posing in front of a dark curtain, references to Spanish models are clear. As with Manet, both of the children depicted look directly at the viewer.

Just as Manet gave the child the riding crop and bridle props in the painting Le petit Lange , similar attributes can also be found in Manet's impressionist painter colleagues. Claude Monet's picture Jean Monet on his rocking horse shows his son on a rocking horse in the garden, which, however, unlike Le petit Lange , is portrayed in natural play. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Child with the Whip is also painted in a natural setting, but, like Manet's Le petit Lange , depicts a child in a persistent pose.

  • Carolus-Duran:
    The daughter Marie-Anne
    1874

  • John Singer Sargent:
    Robert de Cevrieux
    1879

  • Claude Monet:
    Jean Monet on his rocking horse
    1872

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Child with the Whip
    1885

Provenance

The painting Le petit Lange was owned by the Lange family for several decades before it was offered by the Parisian art dealer Bernheim-Jeune in September 1911 . Just two months later, the Paris-based art dealer Dr. Alexander von Frey the painting. In 1913 the Munich modern gallery Heinrich Thannhauser showed Le petit Lange before it was acquired by the Leipzig industrialist Paul von Bleichert . The next owner of the picture was the Swiss manufacturer and art collector Josef Müller from Solothurn, whose collection with works from Pierre-Auguste Renoir to Fernand Léger later found its way into the art museum in his hometown as a foundation. However, Le petit Lange , which Müller sold to the New York art dealer Howard Young, an uncle of the actress Elizabeth Taylor , did not belong to this foundation . The next owner was Annie Swan Coburn from Chicago, who bequeathed the painting to the Art Institute of Chicago along with large parts of her art collection . The museum later sold the picture. On March 2, 1944, the New York lawyer Ralph F. Colin bought the painting at the Parke-Bernet auction house . In 1962, the painting Le petit Lange came to the collection of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe via the Düsseldorf art dealer Wilhelm Grosshenning, which acquired the painting with the help of Toto Lotto funds.

literature

  • Jan Lauts: French masters from the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe . Karlsruhe State Art Gallery, Karlsruhe 1963.
  • Jan Lauts in the yearbook of the state art collections in Baden-Württemberg . First volume, Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 1964.
  • Manuela B. Mena Marqués: Manet en el Prado . Exhibition catalog, Madrid 2003, ISBN 84-8480-053-9 .
  • Gert Reising in Werner Meyer (Red.): 250 masterpieces: 25 years of Toto lottery acquisitions for the art museums in Baden-Württemberg . State Gallery Stuttgart, Stuttgart 1984.
  • Françoise Cachin , Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau : Manet: 1832-1883 . Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 .
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Exhibition catalog, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .
  • Kirsten Claudia Voigt: State Art Gallery Karlsruhe . Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-422-06495-8 .
  • Michael Lüthy: On the threshold of time (Édouard Manet: Child portrait, 1862) . In: Kirsten Claudia Voigt (Ed.): Under four eyes. Languages ​​of the portrait . Exhibition catalog, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Kerber, Bielefeld / Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86678-812-1 ().

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the publications of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, only the French original name Le petit Lange is used. German-language picture titles (such as Der kleine Lange or Der Junge Lange ) only appear sporadically in German translations of foreign-language Manet literature.
  2. ↑ a b c d Kirsten Claudia Voigt: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe , page 88
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Gert Reising: 250 masterpieces , page 26
  4. ↑ a b c Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain in Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , page 487
  5. ↑ Photo of the photo studio Dagron, 66, rue Neuve des Petit-Champs. Noted in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , p. 487
  6. ^ Tabarant Archives, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, page 5. Noted in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , page 487
  7. ↑ Thomas Lederballe in Haavard Rostrup: Historie de Musée d'Ordrupgaard , page 72. Noted in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , page 488
  8. ^ Sophie Pietri, Wildenstein Institute, Paris. Noted in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , p. 488
  9. ↑ Admission of the photo studio Ad. Anjoux, 270, rue St.-Honoré. Noted in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , p. 487
  10. ↑ Manuela B. Mena Marqués: Manet en el Prado , page 435
  11. ^ Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain , p. 215
  12. ^ Françoise Cachin in exhibition catalog Paris 1983: Manet , page 46
  13. ↑ Jan Lauts: Yearbook of the State Art Collections , page 28
  14. ↑ a b Manuela B. Mena Marqués: Manet en el Prado, page 166
  15. ^ Françoise Cachin in exhibition catalog Paris 1983: Manet , page 474
  16. ^ H. Barbara Weinberg in American Artist's Taste for Spanish Painting in Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , p. 297
  17. ↑ All previous owners in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné Volume I No. 61, exact sales dates (except Parke-Bernet) and prices not published.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on November 25, 2007 in this version .