Portrait of Julien de La Rochenoire

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Portrait of Julien de La Rochenoire
Édouard Manet , 1882
55.7 × 35.3 cm
pastel on canvas
J. Paul Getty Museum , Los Angeles

The portrait of Julien de La Rochenoire , also The animal painter La Rochenoire ( French Portrait de Julien de La Rochenoire or Le peintre animalier La Rochenoire ) is a pastel painting on canvas by Édouard Manet in 1882 . It has a height of 35.7 cm and a width of 35.3 cm and shows Julien de La Rochenoire, a fellow painter who was friends with Manet . The picture belongs to the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles .

Image description

The portrait is designed as a chest piece , with the upper body turned slightly to the left of the picture. The upright head of La Rochenoire can be seen in half profile. With a subtle smile, his face appears friendly. The view does not go to the viewer, but to a point outside the left edge of the picture. His black mustache and bushy, also black eyebrows give the face a striking appearance. His head hair is less full. At the top, the hair is combed to one side and shows a hair loss at the transition from the forehead to the parting. The ear is uncovered by the short hairstyle. Individual gray hairs can already be seen in the temple area. La Rochenoire is dressed in a black and gray jacket with a wide collar, under which he wears a white shirt with a stand-up collar. He has tied a black and gray bow to match the jacket around the collar. What is striking is the lack of any props that could identify the sitter as a painter colleague. In contrast to Manet's self-portrait with a palette from 1879, in the portrait of La Rochenoires he dispensed with brushes and palettes as supplements.

Édouard Manet: Self-Portrait with Palette , 1879

In contrast to most of his other portraits from the last years of his life, Manet did not portray La Rochenoire against a monochrome background. Instead, he shows a wallpaper with floral motifs. Sketchy leaves or flowers in light blue and salmon-colored pink tones against a background of beige and white splashes of color can be seen in a wild pattern. The restless background underlines the lively face of La Rochenoires. Just as sketchily as with the background, Manet partly worked on the jacket. For example, the lines of color in the pastel chalk can be clearly seen on the left and right lower margins. The face, on the other hand, is more finely worked out. Individual wrinkles around the eyes and on the forehead are particularly detailed. The face also shows skin areas of different colors. The complexion changes between brown and red. Other areas, especially the nose and part of the forehead, are almost white. This suggests the ray of a light source from the top left outside the image. The picture is signed Manet in the lower right corner .

Manet's pastels with portraits of men

Édouard Manet: Autumn , 1882

A total of 89 pastel pictures are known by Manet. 57 of these are portraits of women and only twelve show portraits of men. For the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe , “Many pastel portraits of women ... well-mannered, much bland and sweet like salon pictures. The portraits of men avoid this deficiency ”. Manet has never received a single commission for a portrait in his career. The pastel portraits of men are so far known portraits of friends and acquaintances. This series includes portraits of unknown young men ( Jeune homme à barbe blonde ), portraits of Louis Gauthier – Lathuille, the son of a restaurant owner friend, of the writers René Maizeroy and George Moore , and of the composers Ernest Cabaner and Emmanuel Chabrier , from Manet's doctor Dr. Materne and by the painters Alphonse Maureau and Constantin Guys . Most of these portraits are bust portraits, only René Maizeroy is shown in two pastel pictures as a full figure.

In the last years of his life, Manet's illness impaired walking and long standing was difficult. So he had to forego the walks he had previously enjoyed on the Parisian boulevards and was instead happy to see visitors in his studio. They not only entertained him, but also occasionally acted as models. La Rochenoire was one of Manet's longtime friends and also a fellow painter. The painter, best known for his depiction of cows in the Norman landscape, visited Manet repeatedly in his studio at 77 Rue d'Amsterdam, where the portrait of La Rochenoire was probably also made. In the last years of his life, Manet repeatedly drew with pastel chalk, as the medium was easier and quicker to work with. The art historian John Rewald advocated the thesis that Manet tried out certain elements such as composition and color with the pastel pictures in order to later implement them in his oil paintings. In the portrait of Julien de La Rochenoire , Rewald sees such preparatory work in the floral background, which he brought a little later to the canvas in a modified form in the oil painting Herbst , a portrait of the actress Méry Laurent .

Provenance

Possibly the picture was a gift from Manet to the sitter. La Rochenoire appeared at the Manet Memorial Exhibition in 1884 at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts as a lender of the picture, which was only referred to as a portrait . In April 1894, the Paris collector J. Nicolas is registered as the owner. In the same year the art dealer Maurice Joyant bought the picture. The portrait was shown in the Galerie Manzi-Joyant in 1912 as part of the Exposition d'art moderne . MG Dortu appeared as the next owner around 1955. Then the New York art dealer Wildenstein & Co. took over the portrait. It showed it in its Tokyo branch in 1986 as part of the exhibition Masterpieces of French Painting . Wildenstein sold the picture in 1987 to a collector whose name was unknown, who left it on permanent loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from May 1987 to October 1996 . On May 7, 2002, the picture was put up for auction in the New York branch of Christie's auction house. "A European private collection" was named as the previous owner. The anonymous new owner paid an auction price of $ 779,500. In 2012/2013 the picture was on display in Toledo (Ohio) and London as part of the exhibition Manet, portraying life and the owner was again noted as a private collection . In a press release dated April 28, 2014, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced the acquisition of the portrait of Julien de La Rochenoire , but without giving any information about the purchase price and previous owner.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The animal painter Delarochenoire in Meier-Grafe, p. 303.
  2. ↑ about 1880 in Meier-Graefe, p. 303, 1882 in Rewald, p. 59, 1882/1883 in Orienti, p. 90, 1878–1880 in Wilson-Bareau, p. 272.
  3. ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 272.
  4. ^ John Rewald: Eduard Manet, pastels , p. 50.
  5. ↑ In addition to Rewald, Maryanne Stevens and Leah Lehmbrock also support this thesis. See Maryanne Stevens: Manet, portraying life , p. 184.
  6. ↑ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Édouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , Volume 2, p. 26.
  7. ^ Press release from the Getty Museum dated April 28, 2014