Plage à marée basse

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Plage à marée basse (Édouard Manet)
Plage à marée basse
Édouard Manet , 1871
Oil on canvas
26.3 x 51.4 cm
Private collection

Plage à marée basse is a picture painted in oil on canvas by the French painter Édouard Manet . It has a height of 26.3 cm and a width of 51.4 cm. The motif of a beach view with boats at low tide is one of the artist's earliest paintings that he painted in the wild. Manet created the painting in March 1871 in Arcachon , where he stayed with his family to await the political developments at the time of the Paris Commune . The painting is in private hands.

Image description

The French title Plage à marée basse means beach at low tide and the motif in the painting is a corresponding beach view. From the land the view is directed to the bay of the Bassin d'Arcachon, protected from sea storms by Cap Ferret . Manet made the maritime motif sketchy with loose brushstrokes. The light blue surface of the sea appears calm, the horizon line appears indistinctly blurred and the light gray sky is hazy. You can see a number of dark boats, some of which are on the water and some on the beach. In the lower third of the image, a sand area released at low tide marks the foreground. Ocher-colored areas indicate a sandy surface; on top of it there are smaller elongated damp areas in graduated gray tones in which reflections are visible. Left of center lying on the beach three boats, which are the typical regional pinnaces is (Pinasse d'Arcachon) whose flat bottom is ideal for coastal waters. The two boats in front were tied to sticks with ropes that stuck in the sand a short distance away. The rear third boat is at the transition from the beach to the water. Here two fishermen are busy with their work. They may be unloading the boat. In addition to the pinnacles, there are other boats in the picture: On the surface of the water in the middle of the picture there are several sailing boats with masts protruding into the sky, in the right half of the picture several boats are tilted at a steep angle on the sand. The picture is signed, but not dated, "Manet" lower right.

Manet's seascape from Arcachon

The painting Plage à marée basse was created in March 1871 in Arcachon. Manet had previously served as a soldier in the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War and was briefly deployed to the front. After the fighting ended, he traveled to his family in the south of France in February 1871. At the beginning of the war he had already sent his wife Suzanne , his mother and his godchild Léon Leenhoff from Paris to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees , where they spent the following months. There Manet met his family again, but initially did not return to Paris due to the unsafe situation. Instead, he traveled with his relatives via Bordeaux to Arcachon, where the family rented a house near the beach and stayed for a month.

During his stay in Arcachon, Manet created six oil paintings. In addition to an interior in Arcachon ( Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute ) with the portraits of Suzanne Manet and Léon Leenhoff and a window view of the sea, Manet painted five sea views. In addition to Plage à marée basse, these include the paintings Arcachon when the weather is fine ( Denver Art Museum ), Seascape in the Storm near Arcachon (private collection), The Bay of Arcachon and the lighthouse on Cap Ferret (private collection) and The Bassin of Arcachon ( Foundation Collection EG Bührle ). These pictures of the beach in Arcachon are directed towards the sea and show boats in the bay of the Bassin d'Arcachon. According to the spring weather, Manet had captured very different moods and sketched his surroundings in a variety of ways, from the gloomy motif to the subject with a cheering sky. Art historian John Leighton pointed out that Manet's Ocean Views from Arcachon were among his earliest oil paintings the artist created in the wild. For Leighton, Manet's "quick response to the changing mood and atmosphere on site ... is remarkable". In these pictures he suspects Manet's reaction “to the more direct open-air techniques of Monet and his contemporaries”.

  • Interior in Arcachon

  • Arcachon in good weather

  • Seascape in a storm near Arcachon

  • Arcachon Bay and lighthouse on Cap Ferret

  • The Arcachon Basin

Provenance

Manet sold the painting Plage à marée basse to Thomas W. Evans , a dentist from Philadelphia. He was a member of Manet's circle of friends and, like the painter, associated with the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the actress and muse Méry Laurent , whom Evans may have suggested to buy Manet's paintings. Evans also owned the seascape in a storm near Arcachon, which was also made in Arcachon, and two still lifes. After Evans' death in 1897, the painting Plage à marée basse remained in his estate for about 10 years before it came onto the art market. In 1938 the painting was offered by the Stendahl Galleries in Los Angeles and sold to the art collector Buell Hammett in August of the same year . He was one of the founders of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and died in 1945. After that, the picture came into the possession of Marianne Graham, wife of the painter John D. Graham and mother of the gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend, in 1949 . Marianne Graham gave the painting to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on permanent loan until 1951. On November 9, 1955, she had the painting auctioned at the Parke-Bernet auction house in New York . On this occasion the art dealer Paul Rosenberg acquired the picture. He resold it in November 1956 to the collector couple Peggy and David Rockefeller . At the auction of the Rockefeller Collection on May 8, 2018 at Christie's auction house in New York , the picture went to an unknown bidder for $ 3,612,500.

literature

  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Juliet Wilson-Bareau , David Degener: Manet and the Sea . Exhibition catalog Chicago, Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Yale University Press, New Haven 2003, ISBN 0-300-10164-3 .
  • John Leighton: Edouard Manet - Sea Impressions . Mercator Fund , Brussels 2004, ISBN 2-930117-35-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The title Plage à marée basse can be found in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , p. 152. In contrast, the title La plage à marée basse , which the auction house Christie's named in 2018, is found. See information about auctioning the painting on the Christie's auction house website . The picture is not included in Sandra Orienti's catalog of works in German. A German-language title is also missing in other publications.
  2. ^ Juliet Wilson-Bareau, David Degener: Manet and the Sea , p. 78.
  3. ^ A b John Leighton: Edouard Manet - Meeresimpressionen , p. 61.
  4. ^ A b Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , p. 152.
  5. ↑ Information on auctioning the painting on the Christie's auction house website