Standing lady between flowers
Édouard Manet , 1876–79
113.5 × 80.5 cm
Oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts , Lyon
Lady standing between flowers or girl in the garden ( French Jeune fille dans les fleurs ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet . The work, which was painted in oil on canvas between 1876 and 1879, was cropped after Manet's death and is now 113.5 cm high and 80.5 cm wide. An unknown young woman is depicted in a garden that is only sketchy. The painting, which was created in the great outdoors, illustrates the style of painting in Manet's late work , which was clearly influenced by Impressionism . The picture belongs to the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon .
Image description
The painting shows a young woman in a garden. Manet reproduced her standing from the front, shifting her position slightly to the right from the center of the picture. She looks directly at the picture viewer. Her face shows a pale complexion and only the closed lips stand out with a vivid red. With just a few strokes of the brush, Manet indicated the brown eyes, the eyebrows and the contours of the nose. The ears are not covered by the hair. A few strands of reddish brown hair protrude from the forehead under a bell-shaped straw hat. The young woman probably wears the rest of her hair tucked up under her hat, as was the fashion of the time. The bright straw hat is decorated with black material, which could be a thin fabric or a feather ornament. The young woman is wearing a long green dress, with her body cut off from the lower edge of the picture at about knee height. Manet painted the dress with long vertical brushstrokes. A striped pattern could be indicated here. In the middle of the chest, between the legs and on the sleeve ends that reach up to the elbows, there is a frilled decoration created by white brushstrokes . At the waist you can see a belt or a ribbon painted with broad horizontal brushstrokes. The sitter has a light blue scarf tied in a bow around her neck. Another prop is a thin brown stick with a flat top tucked under the left arm. This could be the lower end and knob of a rearward protruding parasol. The forearms are crossed in front of the body, with the left hand grasping the right arm. The woman may be wearing long gloves that reach over her forearms, which is indicated by a sharp dividing line in front of the elbows. Only a few areas of the woman seem fully worked out. This is most likely to apply to parts of the dress. Other parts have remained at the sketch stage. In the area of the scarf and to the left and right of the face, it looks as if the painter has scratched off part of the paint - a procedure that would be typical of Manet's way of working.
The background is even less executed than the figure. The unpainted canvas is visible in many parts of the picture. Green areas are painted around the sitter, which fray towards the edges of the picture and merge into individual horizontal or partially crossing diagonal lines. This thinly applied color of the background suggests a quick painting style. It remains unclear what the green background should represent. In addition to a simple lawn, other floral decorations such as hedges or bushes are also conceivable. Manet became a little clearer on the left edge of the picture, where a flowering shrub can be seen. The two pink flowers are level with the young woman's face. Foliage is sketched around them in ocher-colored areas and brownish serpentine lines. Further down there is reed-like growth and in the lower left corner there is a brownish-red paint application that cannot be further assigned. Contrary to what the title of the picture suggests, Standing Lady between Flowers , the portrayed young woman is not standing between the flowers, but next to a flowering shrub. The picture is neither dated nor signed.
Before the picture reached the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 1997, it was rarely exhibited in public. The public reception of this painting is correspondingly low. On the occasion of the Berlin Manet exhibition in 1928, the art critic Max Osborn wrote in the magazine Deutsche Kunst und Decoration about the picture: “The moment that the impression vanishes, flies past, is fixed with a witchcraft of the most airy painterly means as if chiseled in ore”.
background
Little is known about the creation of the picture, its dating and the identity of the young woman depicted. Manet's biographer Adolphe Tabarant dated the picture in his catalog raisonné from 1947 to 1876. He assumed that the painting was created en plein air during a summer stay with the cloth merchant Ernest Hoschedé, who was friends with Manet, at the Château de Rottembourg in Montgeron . Other art historians later deviated from this dating. In 1975 Denis Rouart and Daniel Wildenstein assumed the year 1879 in their Manet catalog raisonné for the painting. They justified their dating with stylistic comparisons with other paintings from Manet's late work influenced by Impressionism. The pictures Woman in the Garden ( Barnes Foundation , Philadelphia) and Young Woman in the Garden (private collection), also dated by Rouart / Wildenstein to the year 1879, also show similarities in the motif. However, the dating of the aforementioned pictures is also controversial.
The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, which has owned the painting Standing Lady between Flowers since 1997, has endorsed Tabarant's thesis. It also assumes that the painting was made at Ernest Hoschedé's country estate in Montgeron, but dated the painting to the year 1877, since Manet's visit to Montgeron is documented for that year. The location of Montgeron and its dating are supported by similarities with other pictures by Manet, which can be shown to have been taken during a stay at Château de Rottembourg. In the painting The Little Jacques Hoschedé in the Garden ( National Museum of Western Art , Tokyo) Manet shows a son of the host in a similar arrangement to the young woman in Lady Standing Between Flowers . Both are positioned next to a flowering plant against a green background. In addition, Manet painted the portrait of Ernest Hoschedé with his daughter Marthe in Montgeron ( Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes , Buenos Aires). The picture, like the woman standing between flowers, is only sketchy in parts. The daughter Marthe, pictured next to Ernest Hoschedé, also has facial features similar to those of the young woman in Lady Standing Between Flowers . It is therefore entirely possible that the person depicted in Standing Lady Between Flowers is one of Ernest Hoschedé's daughters. In addition to Marthe, the daughters Blanche and Suzanne could also be considered here.
Édouard Manet:
Woman in the Garden , 1879
Édouard Manet:
Young woman in the garden , 1879
Édouard Manet:
Little Jacques Hoschedé in the Garden , around 1876–1877
Édouard Manet:
Portrait of Ernest Hoschedé with his daughter Marthe , around 1876–1877
Provenance
The painting was in his possession until Manet's death. At Manet's estate auction on February 4 and 5, 1884 in the auction house Hôtel Drouot , it was auctioned as number 63 and went to the composer Emmanuel Chabrier, a friend of Manet, for 160 francs . Chabrier had Manet portray him in 1880 and owned several paintings by his friend. After Chabrier's death, the heirs had his art collection auctioned on March 26, 1896 in the Hôtel Drouot. On this occasion the painting - lot number 11 of the auction - came into the possession of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel . He trimmed the original 114 cm high and 95 cm wide picture on the sides and removed largely unpainted parts of the canvas in order to sell it better. The next owners were successively the Parisian art dealers Paul Rosenberg , Etienne Bignou and Georges Bernheim . The latter finally took the picture into his private collection. At the auction of Georges Bernheim's collection on June 7, 1935 in the Charpentier Gallery, the painting came up again as number 61 and went to André Schoeller from Paris. The next owner was the diamond dealer and art collector Myran Eknayan , who lived in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine . After his death, he bequeathed his art collection to the former actress Jacqueline Delubac , whom he had married only a few years earlier. Delubac eventually left the picture to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, where it is exhibited along with other works from the Eknayan collection and pictures from her own art collection.
literature
- Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet . Skira, Milan 2005, ISBN 88-7624-472-7 .
- Dominique Brachlianoff, Christian Briend: De Manet à Bacon, la collection Jacqueline Delubac . Réunion des musées nationaux Paris and Musée des Beaux-Arts Lyon 1998, ISBN 2-7118-3678-9 .
- Galerie Matthiesen (ed.): Edouard Manet . Matthiesen Gallery. Berlin 1928.
- Julius Meier-Graefe : Edouard Manet . Piper, Munich 1912.
- Sandra Orienti: The painted work of Edouard Manet. German Book Association, Stuttgart 1972.
- Ronald Pickvance : Manet . Exhibition catalog Martigny, Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny 1996, ISBN 2-88443-037-7 .
- Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
- Adolphe Tabarant : Manet, histoire catalographique. Montaigne, Paris 1931.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lady standing between flowers is the title in the exhibition catalog Berlin 1928, p. 33; Girl in the garden is the name in the German catalog raisonné by Sandra Orienti, p. 106.
- ↑ Dominique Brachlianoff, Christian Briend: De Manet à Bacon, la collection Jacqueline Delubac , p. 32
- ↑ Teresa Sacchi Lodispoto: Giovane donna tra i fiori in Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , S. 286th
- ↑ In 1928 the woman standing between flowers was shown in the Manet exhibition in the Matthiesen gallery in Berlin as well as in the Honderd Jaar Fransche art exhibition in the van Wisselingh gallery in Amsterdam. See Dominique Brachlianoff, Christian Briend: De Manet à Bacon, la collection Jacqueline Delubac p. 32.
- ^ Max Osborn: The Berlin Manet Exhibition in German Art and Decoration from April 1928, Volume XXXI Issue 7, p. 143.
- ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses oeuvres , p. 293.
- ^ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , Volume I, pp. 244–245.
- ↑ Woman in the Garden (Barnes Foundation) is dated by Sandra Orienti to the year 1881 and Young Woman in the Garden (private collection) to the year 1876. See Sandra Orienti: The painted work of Edouard Manet , pp. 106 and 116.
- ↑ Dominique Brachlianoff, Christian Briend: De Manet à Bacon, la collection Jacqueline Delubac , p. 32
- ↑ In a letter from the writer Edmond Duranty to his colleague Émile Zola from September 1877, he mentions that Manet had recently returned to Paris from Montgereon. See Ronald Pickvance: Manet , p. 232.
- ↑ Julius Meier-Graefe: Edouard Manet , p. 322.
- ^ Adolphe Tabarant: Manet et ses oeuvres , p. 293.