Madame Loubens in bed
Édouard Manet , around 1878–1882
44.5 × 53.5 cm
pastel on canvas
Private collection
Madame Loubens in Bed , also The Convalescent or Reclining Woman , (French: Mme Loubens au Lit ) is a picture drawn in pastel on canvas by Édouard Manet . The 44.5 cm high and 53.5 cm wide picture shows Madame Loubens, who is friends with the Manet family. Manet may have portrayed the woman lying in her bed during a visit to the sick. The picture is in a private collection.
Image description
The picture shows Madame Loubens in her bed. Manet portrayed her close up, so that only her face and the upper body resting on the bent right arm can be seen. Her head is supported by the spread fingers of her right hand and her face is facing the picture viewer. Manet used only a few colors in this picture. The face with its elongated nose and full lips, like the hand, has a complexion in delicate pink tones. In addition, there is a light brown for the hair styled backwards. The other areas of the picture are predominantly white and gray, with the gray tones being partially achieved with brown and blue hatching .
Although Manet made the picture very sketchy in large areas, many details are still recognizable. Madame Loubens wears a long-sleeved white nightgown that is covered with a duvet up to the waist. She has partially covered her hair with an almost transparent white cloth. Possibly made of the same material and connected to the headscarf, there is a fabric placed around the neck. A large pillow supports the back. At the top of the picture and behind the left shoulder, gathered white fabrics suggest a four-poster bed. A broad dark stripe on the right edge of the picture opens the picture into the space next to the bed without defining it more precisely.
Manet, who caused a scandal with the painting Olympia in the 1860s , avoided any sexual innuendos in the pastel painting Madame Loubens in bed . While the Olympia flaunts the whole body lying naked on the bed, Madame Loubens is largely wrapped in white, the color of innocence. The picture is signed 'E. Manet ”signed but not dated.
background
From the late 1870s until his death in 1883, Manet created a series of pastel pictures in which he mostly portrayed women. Working with pastel chalk enabled Manet to work faster than was necessary for oil painting. Since he had health problems and had difficulties standing for long periods of time, he often resorted to this medium in the last years of his life. An exact dating of the picture is not possible due to the lack of records by the artist, so that the year of creation is sometimes given as 1880 and sometimes as the period 1878–1882. At the time, the depicted Madame Loubens was around 40 years old.
Marie Héloise Claire Loubens was a member of the Manet family. It is possible that he had already depicted her in the group portrait Music in the Tuileries Garden from 1862. She was also friends with the painter Berthe Morisot and has repeatedly been portrayed by Edgar Degas , for example in the pastel painting Madame Loubens ( Metropolitan Museum of Art ). At about the same time as Madame Loubens in bed , Manet created another pastel for his girlfriend sitting with Madame Loubens (private collection). In both pictures she supports her head with her hand. It is known that Madame Loubens was often sickly after the death of two of her children. It is possible that Manet created the picture of Madame Louben in bed during a visit to the sick within a short time.
Manet had previously varied the motif of the woman dressed in white in various pictures. The oil painting Portrait of Marguerite de Conflans with a Hood ( Oskar Reinhart Collection "Am Römerholz" ), in which the depicted woman also supports her head with her arm and white fabric envelops the body, bears the greatest resemblance to Madame Loubens in bed .
Provenance
The pastel Madame Loubens in bed , like the second portrait of the sitter, Madame Loubens seated , was in his possession until Manet's death in 1883 and then passed on to his wife Suzanne Manet as an inheritance . The latter gave the picture Madame Loubens seated to the sitter and sold the picture Madame Loubens in bed at the end of 1883 to Anna Dike Riddle Scott from Philadelphia , widow of the railroad entrepreneur and politician Thomas Alexander Scott . She was advised on her art purchases by the American painter Mary Cassatt , who knew the Paris art scene well and was friends with several European painters.
Madame Loubens in Bed was one of the first Manet paintings to reach the United States and remained in the Scott family's possession for several decades. After the death of Anna Dike Riddle Scott, her daughter Mary D. Scott inherited the picture before her son Clement B. Newholt became the owner of the pastel. Subsequently, his wife Anna Newholt inherited the picture. The picture was then placed in a private collection not known by name before it entered the collection of Jean Bonna from Geneva via the New York art dealer Wildenstein and Company in 2003 . Bonna repeatedly loaned the pastel painting to exhibitions in the following years. It was seen in Paris in 2006, Edinburgh and New York in 2009, Vienna in 2012 and Lausanne in 2015.
literature
- Stijn Alsteens (Ed.): Raphael to Renoir, drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-588-39307-4 .
- Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36050-5 .
- Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
Individual evidence
- ↑ German title according to Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, works , S. 60th
- ↑ French title according to the catalog raisonné by Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Vol. 2, p. 16 No. 40.
- ↑ Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet, works , S. 60th
- ↑ Stijn Alsteens: Raphael to Renoir, drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna , S. 236th