Masked ball in the opera

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Painting "Masked Ball in the Opera" by Édouard Manet
Masked ball in the opera
Édouard Manet , 1878/79
59.1 × 72.5 cm
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC

Masked ball in the opera (French: Bal masqué à l'Opéra or Le bal de l'Opera ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet from 1873 . The 59.1 × 72.5 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, shows Manet, accompanied by his friends, at the annual masked ball of the old Paris Opera on Rue Le Pelletier . Manet worked on the painting, for which various preliminary studies exist, for several months in his studio. Before he even completed the picture, the opera house burned down and was later demolished. Manet's masked ball in the opera therefore shows an event that took place for the last time at this location and was only given a new location after the completion of the Opéra Garnier .

The masked ball in the opera was one of the works that Manet presented to the jury of the Salon de Paris in 1874, but the jury rejected the picture without giving reasons. Although the painting was only shown in a public exhibition after Manet's death, it has been one of the artist's most discussed works since its creation. Manet's contemporaries Stéphane Mallarmé and Edmond de Goncourt already dealt with the painting, later followed by the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe or the French philosopher Michel Foucault . There is disagreement not only on the question of possible models for this work, but some authors also see allusions to the political situation at the beginning of the Third French Republic , which could be a reason for the rejection of the picture for the Salon of 1874.

The painting is one of the few group portraits in the artist's oeuvre and is one of the few works in which Manet portrayed himself. The painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC

Provenance

Manet sold the painting on November 18, 1873 directly from his studio, without intermediaries, for 6,000 francs to the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure . He was one of the earliest supporters of the Impressionists and owned 67 works by Manet, the largest collection of his works in private ownership. On April 29, 1878 Faure had part of his collection auctioned at the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot . Among them was the masked ball in the opera , number 40, which was returned to Faure for 6,000 francs. He kept the picture until January 9, 1893, when he sold it for 15,000 francs to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who first offered it in the Paris branch of his gallery and later exhibited it in the New York branch.

On January 16, 1894, the American sugar manufacturer Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife Louisine bought the masked ball at the Durand-Ruel Opera for $ 8,000 . The couple were among the earliest collectors of Impressionism in the United States, and their collection included 25 works by Manet, including some of the artist's major works. After the death of Henry Osborne Havemeyer in 1907, this collection remained with his wife, who bequeathed most of the works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in her will . After her death in 1929 a small part of the painting collection went to the three children of the Havemeyers. The son Horace Havemeyer (1886–1956) inherited the masked ball in the opera , which later passed into the possession of his wife Doris Anna Dick (1890–1982). After her death, the painting was "donated by Mrs. Horace Havemeyer in memory of her mother-in-law Louisine Havemeyer" to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

literature

  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • 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 .
  • Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy, the Havemeyer Collection . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1993, ISBN 0-87099-665-7 .
  • Frances Weitzenhoffer: The Havemeyers, Impressionism comes to America . Abrams, New York 1986, ISBN 0-8109-1096-9 .
  • Christian Lenz (ed.): French impressionists and their trailblazers . Neue Pinakothek, Munich 1990.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ While in German literature mostly masked ball at the opera is used, is at Lenz from the masked ball at the Opera House to read (Lenz: French Impressionists , p 88). French titles vary between Le bal de l'Opéra (Rouart / Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné, p. 180) and Bal masqué à l'Opéra (Catalog Paris 1983, p. 349).
  2. ↑ Rouart / Wildenstein give a different picture size of 60 × 73 cm. See Rouart / Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , p. 180
  3. ^ Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy . P. 355.
  4. ^ Exhibition catalog Paris, New York 1983. German edition p. 67
  5. ^ Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy . P. 355.
  6. ↑ Inventoried in Paris as Bal de l'Opera with No. 2582, in New York as Bal à l'Opera with No. 1131. See Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy . P. 355.
  7. ^ Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy . Pp. 352-358.
  8. ^ Frelinghuysen: Splendid Legacy . P. 284.
  9. ^ Weitzenhoffer: The Havemeyers . P. 98.
  10. ^ Lenz: French Impressionists . P. 88.

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