Portrait de Mme Du Paty
The portrait de Mme Du Paty is a pastel portrait drawn on canvas by Édouard Manet from 1880. The 54 cm high and 34 cm wide portrait shows Madame Du Paty, who is friends with the Manet family, wife of the painter Léon Du Paty . It is one of a series of portraits of women that Manet made a few years before his death. The portrait is in a private collection.
Image description
The picture shows the portrait of Madame Du Paty executed as a shoulder piece. It shows the bust-shaped upper body in a frontal view with a head turned towards the left shoulder, with her gaze directed towards the right edge of the picture. She wears a sleeveless gray-brown dress that lets a shade of yellow shimmer through in the chest area and that is overall rather sketchy. The large, rectangular neckline is striking . The dress is richly decorated around the neckline. The straps of the dress are kept in blue and yellow and adorned with ruffles on the edges . There are also some applied ornaments in shades of brown, which could be floral motifs. The skin in the cleavage area is predominantly white, a pink shade can only be made out near the right strap. Such subtle pink tones can also be found on the upper arms. On the other hand, the skin color on the neck is light beige. The complexion on the face varies between white, pink and various shades of gray. Madame Du Paty has her brown eyes wide open and seems to fixate on a point outside the picture. She has wide eyebrows, a nose that is not overly large and a rather small mouth with closed lips. Overall, the facial expression looks rather friendly; a tentative smile may be indicated. The sitter has combed her straight, lying brown hair into a kind of side parting, leaving the ear and neck area free. She may have pinned her hair up behind her head, which could indicate a strand protruding above her right ear. The image background consists of monochrome gray hatching that only partially covers the primed canvas. Especially in the corners of the picture, the canvas is free of any paint. The picture is signed, but not dated, "Manet" lower right.
background
Madame Du Paty and her husband, the painter Léon Du Paty, were friends of the Manet family. Although Léon Du Paty exhibited successfully as a history painter in the Salon de Paris , he and Manet had little artistic contact. Manet may have invited Léon Du Paty to his studio at 77 Rue d'Amsterdam in Paris to show his latest works. On such an occasion, Madame Du Paty could have accompanied her husband and created her pastel portrait. Manet appreciated the quick way of working with pastel drawing and the portrait of Madame Du Paty was certainly created during a session in one day.
Manet's last years were marked by illness. Paralysis in his leg caused him pain, especially when standing. Working on the easel, especially with large-format paintings, was becoming increasingly difficult for him. From around 1878 until his death in 1883, he therefore repeatedly turned to pastel drawing, which was less complex than oil painting. Of the known pastels by Manet almost all developed in the last five years of life and much of it shows portraits of young women. All of these female portraits represent friends and acquaintances of Manet. Most of the portraits are depicted in the detail as chest or shoulder pieces. While Manet sometimes particularly emphasized the women's wardrobe and lush hat creations determine the picture, there are also portraits in which clothing is only hinted at and the head is left uncovered.
The portrait of Mme Zola ( Musée d'Orsay , Paris) is similar to the portrait of Madame Du Paty and also shows the wife of a friend - here that of the writer Émile Zola . The bust-shaped dress, the look over the shoulder to the edge of the picture, similarities in the hairstyle or in the treatment of the background - both pictures show several similarities. The portrait of Manet's friend Mlle Isabelle Lemonnier ( Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York) also features a bust-shaped portrait - this time in profile - against a gray background. The publisher Georges Charpentier exhibited all three portraits as part of a Manet exhibition in April 1880 in the rooms of the magazine La Vie moderne . On the occasion of the exhibition, the critic Gustave Goetschy praised these three pastel pictures as "merveilles de finesse et de grace " (meaning: miracles of sensitivity and grace ). When the picture of Madame Du Paty was seen in Germany in 1910, the art historian Emil Waldmann praised the “dazzling creature” and called the representation “alive”.
Other portraits of women from Manet's recent years are the Portrait de Marie Colombier ( Burrell Collection , Glasgow) and the Portrait de Mme Michel-Lévy ( National Gallery of Art , Washington DC). In her portrait, also drawn in 1880, the actress Marie Colombier looks directly at the viewer, a pose that corresponds to her profession. Her portrait is again created in a bust-shaped section against a gray background, but overall more finely worked out than the portrait of Madame Du Paty. In addition, both ladies appear to have a similar hairstyle. In the portrait of Madame Michel-Lévy from 1882, whose exact identity has not been clarified, Manet chose a different image section and shows the sitter as a hip image. The dress of Madame Michel-Lévy has a very similar neckline in the cleavage area as that of Madame Du Paty. Parallels can also be found in both portraits in the face and hairstyle. In the portrait of Madame Michel-Lévy, however, Manet avoided any sketchiness and instead shows the sitter in her fashionable presentation full of details.
Portrait de Mme Zola , 1879
Mlle Isabelle Lemonnier , 1879-80
Portrait de Marie Colombier , 1880
Portrait de Mme Michel-Lévy , 1882
Provenance
The painting was initially in the possession of the portrayed Madame Du Party, who loaned the portrait to the Manet Memorial Exhibition in Paris in 1884. Then it appeared in the collection of the margarine manufacturer Auguste Pellerin . His collection of numerous works by Manet was offered for sale in 1910 in the Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune and the Munich gallery of Heinrich Thannhauser , including the portrait of Madame Du Paty. Paul Durand-Ruel's art dealer then offered the picture - initially in the Paris branch and in 1911 in the company's New York gallery. The picture then ended up in the collection of Joseph Flanagan from Boston. He had the picture auctioned on January 14, 1920 in New York at the American Art Association. The New York entrepreneur Payne Whitney (1876–1927) became the new owner for 4,500 US dollars . After his death, his wife, the writer Helen Hay Whitney (1875-1944) inherited the picture before her son John Hay Whitney got it after her death . His heirs had the picture auctioned on May 10, 1999 in the New York branch of the auction house Sotheby’s , where it went to the entrepreneur A. Alfred Taubman (1924–2015) for 662,500 US dollars . From his estate, the picture was auctioned again on November 15, 2016 at Sotheby's in New York and went to an unknown bidder for $ 348,500.
literature
- Stéphane Guégan: Manet, inventeur du moderne . Musée d'Orsay, Gallimard, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-07-013323-9 .
- Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet . Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main 1981, ISBN 3-548-36051-3 .
- Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
Individual evidence
- ^ Title according to the catalog raisonné by Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné , vol. 2, p. 15 no. 34.
- ↑ The year 1880 comes from the exhibition catalog Stéphane Guégan: Manet, inventeur du moderne , p. 87. Other authors sometimes give different dates. For example, there is the statement 1879 in Sandra Orienti: Edouard Manet , p. 44 and the statement 1878–1880 in Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné vol. 2, p. 15 no. 34.
- ↑ Gustave Goetschy: Édouard Manet in La Vie moderne from April 17, 1880. Quoted in Stéphane Guégan: Manet, inventeur du moderne , p. 86.
- ^ Emil Waldmann: Edouard Manet in the Pellerin Collection in Art and Artists No. 8, 1910, p. 394.
- ↑ It could be the wife of the painter Henri Michel-Lévy (1822–1907), but the painter Émile Lévy (1826–1890) or other people could also be considered.
- ↑ Information on the auction on the auction house's website www.sothebys.com