Monsieur and Madame Manet

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Monsieur and Madame Manet
Edgar Degas , around 1868
65 × 71 cm
oil on canvas
Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art , Kitakyūshū

Monsieur and Madame Manet is the title of a painting by the French painter Edgar Degas from around 1868 . The 65 × 71 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, belongs to the collection of the Kitakyūshū Municipal Museum of Art in the Japanese city of Kitakyūshū . It depicts the painter Édouard Manet , who is a friend of Degas , who has made himself comfortable on a sofa while his wife Suzanne sits next to him at the piano. Manet cut off the right strip of the painting because he was dissatisfied with the execution of his wife's face. At this point there is a piece of unpainted canvas today.

Image description

In the painting Monsieur and Madame Manet , the painter Édouard Manet is portrayed as he seems to be listening to his wife Suzanne playing the piano. The wide strip of unpainted canvas on the right is striking. Here Degas originally depicted Suzanne Manet's face and her hands on the keyboard. This piece of canvas was cut off by Manet and is no longer preserved. Several decades later, Degas added a piece of primed canvas to the painting in order to repaint that area, but this never happened.

Édouard Manet is sitting on a sofa that is on a side wall in the left half of the picture. The capped armrests piece of furniture with a white slipcover covered. Manet has taken a comfortable posture. While your left leg is stretched out towards the floor, your left hand is in your pocket. The right leg lies at an angle on the seat and the right foot hangs in the air in front of the sofa. The right shoe with a light gaiter that extends into the room is striking . Manet wears a dark suit, including an ocher waistcoat, a white shirt and a dark tie. With his upper body leaning to one side, he rests his head on the back cushion on his right hand, while the right elbow touches the thigh. Manet's face has a rosy complexion . His reddish-brown beard and the curly brown hair over his right ear and free forehead are striking.

Suzanne Manet is seated upright on the right. She wears a white dress that is decorated with narrow vertical black stripes in the lower area. Her brown hair is pinned up at the back of her head so that her right ear is visible. Due to the cropping of the picture, the face and the arms that can be recognized at the beginning are missing. Even if the piano and the hands on the keyboard are missing in the picture, Suzanne Manet's posture can give the impression of a pianist.

Édouard Manet: Madame Manet at the piano , around 1868

Degas shows the Manet couple in the corner of a sparsely furnished room. Next to the chair on which Madame Manet sits and of which only the dark backrest can be seen, there is the sofa on which Édouard Manet has taken a seat. Behind him is a round pillow with a red border and an embroidery or tapestry . The two walls are sketchy in an iridescent application of color, which ranges from brown tones to turquoise. Only two gold strips indicate a wall paneling, in the foreground there is a light floor. On the basis of these few details and through comparisons with paintings by Manet, such as Madame Manet at the piano ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris), the spatial situation could be identified as a room in the Manet's apartment at 49 rue de Saint-Petersbourg the couple moved in the fall of 1866.

Manet is not portrayed as a painter in the painting Monsieur and Madame Manet , but as a private person in a domestic scene. He's sunk into the sofa and doesn't seem to pay any attention to his wife. It is known from his school friend Antonin Proust that Manet was not interested in music. So he probably only half-heartedly listened to his wife's piano playing and was physically present but absent in his thoughts. The art historian Jean Sutherland Boggs commented on this picture that it was "a skilfully simple representation of both Manet and the world in which he lived and therefore stands for portrait and genre painting in one."

The friendship between Degas and Manet

There are few written records of the friendship between Degas and Manet, who was about two and a half years his senior. A few letters from the years 1868–1869 have survived, but it is unclear when the two artists met. The assumptions on this range from 1859 to 1862. Manet's biographer Étienne Moreau-Nélaton reports that Degas and Manet first met in the Louvre . Degas was in the process of copying a portrait of Infanta Margarita, then ascribed to Diego Velázquez , by drawing it directly on a copper plate. Manet was an admirer of Velázquez and had also copied the portrait of Infanta Margarita for an etching. A closer friendship, however, does not seem to have developed until the mid-1860s. Various drawings from this period, in which Degas portrayed his colleague Manet, bear witness to this.

  • Edgar Degas:
    Édouard Manet , etching

  • Edgar Degas:
    Édouard Manet, seated , black chalk

  • Edgar Degas:
    Édouard Manet, standing , pencil and watercolor

  • Edgar Degas:
    Édouard Manet , etching

Degas and Manet had a few things in common. They were both from Paris and their families belonged to the well-off middle class. Unlike many of their later Impressionist friends , they were hardly interested in landscape painting, but preferred the representation of La Vie modern - of contemporary life in Paris. Degas and Manet frequented artist pubs such as the Café Guerbois or the Tortoni and had mutual friends such as the writers Edmond Duranty and Émile Zola , the Salonière Nina de Callias , the singer Lorenzo Pagans or the painter colleagues Henri Fantin-Latour , Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , Alfred Stevens and, from the late 1860s, Berthe Morisot . After Manet's wedding in 1863, Degas' circle of friends also included his wife Suzanne . Degas came repeatedly as a guest to the Manets, who invited friends to exchange ideas on Thursdays. The trained pianist Suzanne Manet played the piano at these social gatherings and Degas was sure to see her. In return, the Manets were guests at the evening parties in the house of Auguste de Gas, the father of the unmarried Edgar Degas.

Edgar Degas (front) and Paul-Albert Bartholomé in Degas' apartment. Photo by an unknown photographer around 1895–97. In the background Manet's painting The Ham and on the right Degas painting Monsieur and Madame Manet , before the canvas was added.

The painting Monsieur and Madame Manet was a gift from Degas to Édouard Manet and as such a sign of friendship. After receiving the picture, Manet had cut off a strip of canvas on the right edge. Manet's biographer Étienne Moreau-Nélaton and gallery owner Ambroise Vollard reported on this in the 1920s. As early as 1895, Manet's niece Julie described a visit to Degas in her diary, during which she saw the painting for the first time and asked the painter about it. Afterwards she noted "since my uncle found his wife depicted too ugly, he simply cut her off". This led to considerable tension between the two painters. Degas took his picture back with him and then sent back a still life painted by Manet. Manet, in turn, felt challenged as an artist and now painted a portrait of his wife at the piano ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris). The tension between the two painters did not last long, however. Degas later tried to get the still life back from Manet, but the latter had already sold it. Degas also seems to have liked the portrait of Monsieur and Madame Manet in the cropped state, as he had hung it framed as such in his salon, as a photograph from 1895-97 shows - right next to Manet's painting The Ham ( Burrell Collection , Glasgow) .

Provenance

After Degas originally bestowed Manet paintings Monsieur and Madame Manet had received back, it remained with him until his death in 1917. At the auction of the estate of Degas in March 1918 was the image of 40,000 francs to the Parisian gallery Trotti & Cie , the acted on behalf of the Danish collector Wilhelm Hansen . Within a few years, Hansen had built up an extensive collection of Danish art from the 19th century and works by French artists, predominantly from Impressionism and Post-Impressionism . When Hansen ran into financial difficulties in 1923, he was forced to sell 75 works from his collection. This also included the painting Monsieur and Madame Manet , which went to the Japanese collector Matsukata Kōjirō on this occasion . Kōjirō later sold the picture to the industrialist Wada Kyuzaemon (1890–1968) from Kōbe . It then belonged to a private collector who was not known by name and who gave the painting to the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo as a permanent loan from 1971 to 1973 . In 1974 Degas Monsieur and Madame Manet were presented as part of the collection of the newly opened Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art .

literature

  • Felix Baumann (ed.), Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits . Exhibition catalog Zurich and Tübingen, Merrell Holberton, London 1994, ISBN 1-85894-017-6 .
  • Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 1988, ISBN 0-87099-519-7 .
  • Françoise Cachin , Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau : Manet: 1832–1883 . Exhibition catalog, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 .
  • Ann Dumas , Colta Feller Ives, Françoise Cachin: The private collection of Edgar Degas . Abrams, New York 1997, ISBN 0-8109-6512-7 .
  • Julie Manet: The Diary of Julie Manet. A youth under the spell of the Impressionists . German translation by Sybille A. Rott-Illfeld, Knaus, Munich and Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-8135-3694-7 .
  • Beate Marks-Hanßen, Nora Bierich, Sabine Mangold: Japan's love for impressionism . Exhibition catalog Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Prestel, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7913-5493-4 .
  • Étienne Moreau-Nélaton : Manet . Laurens, Paris 1926
  • Antonin Proust : Edouard Manet, memories . German translation by Margarete Mauthner, Cassirer, Berlin 1917.
  • Adolphe Tabarant : Manet et ses œuvres . Gallimard, Paris 1947.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German title according to Beate Marks-Hanßen, Nora Bierich, Sabine Mangold: Japan's love for impressionism. P. 246.
  2. ↑ Beate Marks-Hanßen in Beate Marks-Hanßen, Nora Bierich, Sabine Mangold: Japan's love for impressionism. P. 102.
  3. ↑ Ann Dumas, Colta Feller Ives, Françoise Cachin: The private collection of Edgar Degas. P. 183.
  4. ^ A b c Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas. P. 142.
  5. ↑ Ann Dumas, Colta Feller Ives, Françoise Cachin: The private collection of Edgar Degas, p. 181.
  6. ^ Antonin Proust: Edouard Manet, memories. P. 10.
  7. ^ Ann Dumas, Colta Feller Ives, Françoise Cachin: The private collection of Edgar Degas, p. 182.
  8. ^ Jean Sutherland Boggs in Felix Baumann, Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits. P. 26.
  9. ^ Jean Sutherland Boggs in Felix Baumann, Jean Sutherland Boggs: Degas, the portraits. P. 24.
  10. ^ Françoise Cachin in Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832-1883. P. 506.
  11. ↑ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses œuvres. P. 37.
  12. ↑ Etienne Moreau-Nélaton: Manet. P. 36.
  13. ^ Diary entry from November 20, 1895 in Julie Manet: The Diary of Julie Manet. A youth under the spell of the Impressionists. P. 85.
  14. ↑ Both paintings cannot be clearly dated, but the art historian Françoise Cachin assumes that the Manet painting was clearly based on Degas' double portrait of the Manets. See Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett, and Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883. P. 286.