Portrait of Eugène Manet

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Portrait of Eugène Manet
Edgar Degas , 1874
65.2 × 81 cm
oil on canvas
Private collection

The portrait of Eugène Manet (short also Eugène Manet , French: Portrait d'Eugène Manet ) is a painting by Edgar Degas . The picture, painted in oil on canvas, has a height of 65.2 cm and a width of 81 cm. The picture was a wedding present to Berthe Morisot, who was friends with the painter, and to Eugène Manet , a brother of the painter Édouard Manet, shown in the picture . The picture is in a private collection.

Image description

In the painting Degas shows the portrait of Eugène Manet. He portrayed him sitting in a landscape, from the front and with his back to the left edge of the picture. While Manet has bent his left leg a little, his right leg is stretched out in the grass. On the outside of his brown trousers there is a separate narrow strip that underlines the long horizontal line of the leg. His shoes have a black upper, which contrasts with the bright color of the soles. With his right hand he is holding a dark walking stick between his legs, which has a striped pattern in the upper area. Manet's left arm cannot be seen. He may use it to support himself laterally backwards. His upper body is tilted slightly forward. He is wearing a blue-gray jacket, the lower end of which extends to the grass. Under the open jacket is a dark top - possibly a vest - with a V-neck and underneath a white shirt. Manet has tied a black scarf with white dots around his neck. The head is covered by a wide- brimmed black hat pulled over the forehead . Large parts of the face are covered by a dark full beard. Skin can only be seen around the eyes, nose and right ear. The head position is upright, the gaze is directed forward to the right edge of the picture. It remains to be seen whether Manet fixes a point outside the picture or looks lost in thought into the void.

Large parts of the picture are reserved for depicting the landscape. In the foreground you can see the grassy area on which Eugène Manet has taken his seat. Degas painted the grass with little detail with dots and short strokes in shades of green and yellow, while Manet's face, for example, was finely painted. In the front left are two gray stones in the grass, under which the painter has put the signature “Degas”. Behind Manet, the grassy area is bordered by a sand-colored path that slopes down from the left to the right edge of the picture. Behind it extends a yellow field with furrows, which could be a - harvested - grain field. Shortly below the horizon line, a curvy, light path can be seen in the middle in the distance, which leads to white houses on the upper right edge. At the top left there is a narrow gray-blue stripe, which could be both a representation of the sky and a view of the sea.

Background to the creation of the picture

Degas probably knew the Eugène Manet portrayed in the picture since the 1860s. He was friends with his brother, the painter Édouard Manet , and was in the same social circle as the Manet family. The painter Berthe Morisot also belonged to Degas and the Manets . She and Eugène Manet had met during the Normandy summer vacation in 1873 and married in December 1874. Degas painted the portrait of Eugène Manet a few weeks earlier in the autumn of 1874 and gave it to the couple at their wedding. The portrait sessions took place in Morisot's apartment, the background was created by the painter's imagination.

The depiction of Eugène Manet sitting in the grass is unusual in Degas' work. Possibly he based himself on paintings by his friend Édouard Manet. He had portrayed his brother in two of his pictures in a similar pose. On the one hand, Eugène Manet appears as a sitting figure on the right in the famous painting Breakfast in the Green ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris) from 1863, on the other hand he can be seen in On the Beach (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) from 1873. At the model sessions for Breakfast in the Green , he took turns with his brother Gustave. In this picture, a walking stick in hand is one of the props of the seated man. A walking stick, which can also be found in the portrait of Eugène Manet , as well as the casual clothing and the casual pose, could characterize the now 41-year-old Manet as an idler who was not doing any job at the time. In the painting On the Beach , Édouard Manet portrayed his brother Eugène together with his wife Suzanne Manet on the beach at Berck on the Normandy coast. This picture was taken on-site during the holidays when Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot met.

The portrait of Eugène Manet can also be seen as Degas' artistic response to a work by Berthe Morisot. In The Reading ( Cleveland Museum of Art ) from 1873, Morisot had portrayed her sister Edma sitting in the grass reading a book. Both the person sitting in the grass and the background with the high horizon line and the curved path are present in the paintings by Degas and Morisot. Moriot had loaned the picture to the Impressionists' first group exhibition in the spring of 1874, at which Degas also showed some of his works. The portrait of Eugène Manet was publicly exhibited at the second group exhibition of the Impressionists in 1876.

  • Édouard Manet: Breakfast in the Green , 1863

  • Édouard Manet: On the Beach , 1873

  • Berthe Morisot: The Reading , 1873

Provenance

Degas gave the portrait of Eugène Manet as a wedding present to Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet in 1874. After the deaths of Eugène Manet in 1892 and Berthe Morisot in 1895, their only child, Julie Manet, inherited the painting. She kept it until her death in 1966. Her heirs had the painting auctioned on May 19, 1981 in the New York branch of Christie's auction house, where it went to an unknown bidder for $ 2.2 million. It is still in a private collection today.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The size information is taken from Felix Baumann, Marianne Karabelnik-Matta: Degas, die Portraits , p. 344. The dimensions differ from 66 x 82 cm, see Paul-André Lemoisne: Degas et son oeuvre , no. 339, p. 178.
  2. ^ Charles P. Stuckey, William P. Scott: Berthe Morisot, Impressionist , p. 61.
  3. ^ Felix Baumann, Marianne Karabelnik-Matta: Degas, the portraits , p. 263.