Tama, a Japanese dog

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Tama, a Japanese dog
Édouard Manet , around 1875
61 × 50 cm
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC

Tama, a Japanese dog ( French Tama, un chien japonais ) is the title of a painting by Édouard Manet from around 1875 . The work, painted in oil on canvas, has the dimensions 61 cm × 50 cm. It shows the standing dog Tama, whom Manet's friends brought back from a trip to Japan. The painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC

Image description

Tama, a Japanese dog is a portrait of a dog. He stands in the middle of the picture and shows the viewer the body with the erect bushy tail from the side. The head is turned slightly to the right shoulder and the open brown eyes fix a point on the left outside the picture. The pink tongue protrudes from the slightly opened mouth. The dog's coat varies between black and white. The head, back and rump are predominantly black, while the chest, stomach and legs have white fur. The white middle line on the forehead and the white area around the nose, which mark the face with a high contrast, are striking. The bushy tail is made up of black and white hair. Manet used short brushstrokes to paint the hair protruding from the body, thereby emphasizing the dog's lively temperament.

A Japanese doll is lying on the beige floor in front of the dog. Her white head extends to the bottom of the picture. She is dressed in a black robe from which a reddish lining peeks out. In addition, the white limbs of the arms or hands can be seen. The colors of the doll - white, black and red - repeat the colors of the fur and, slightly modified, the dog's tongue. The signature “Manet” can be found in the corner to the right of the doll.

A dark red wall can be seen behind the dog. Narrow vertical stripes suggest a wooden wall, on which a horizontal, wide strip in a light shade provides stability. A light stick leaning against the wall to the right of the dog gives the composition a spatial component. The short, backward-reaching shadows suggest sunlight or another light source from above. On the left side above the dog on the wall, in gold letters, is the word “TAMA” - it is the dog's name.

A Japanese dog

A number of dogs appear in Manet's pictures, most of which appear in the company of people. A small dog with black and white fur - not unlike the dog Tama - can already be found in The Balcony, painted in 1868–69 . There he can be seen at the bottom of the picture at the feet of a group portrait and has a play ball as a prop in front of him, which anticipates the doll in the painting Tama, a Japanese dog . Tama , a dog of the Japanese Chin breed , came into Manet's field of vision a few years later. Inspired by the Paris World's Fair in 1867 , which included arts and crafts from Japan, Manet's school friend Théodore Duret and his friend Henri Cernuschi traveled through several Asian countries to study at the beginning of the 1870s. From there, Cernuschi in particular brought numerous works of art, which are now in the Paris Musée Cernuschi . The dog Tama also came along from the trip as a “living souvenir” .

Manet first made a few sketches of the dog with pencil on paper before turning to the painting. Capturing the lively animal in the picture required a quick way of working, which is similar to the painting style of Impressionism . Pictures of lap dogs were particularly popular with Manet's female friends, so that he created other dog portraits after Tama . These pictures were probably made in his studio, although Manet is said to have been afraid that the dogs would damage his paintings. Around the same time as Manet, his painter colleague Pierre-Auguste Renoir created a portrait of the dog Tama ( Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute , Williamstown (Massachusetts) ). He renounced the clear reference to Japan with the doll in the foreground and the eye-catching lettering in the background.

  • Édouard Manet:
    The balcony (detail), 1868–69, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

  • Édouard Manet:
    Study of Tama , 1875

  • Édouard Manet:
    Study of Tama , 1875

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir:
    Tama , around 1876

Provenance

The painting Tama, a Japanese dog , may have been a gift to the dog's owner and Manet's friend Théodore Duret . He loaned the picture to an exhibition in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1903 . The next owner is known to be Raphael Gérard, who lives in Paris and who owned the picture around 1932. Then Georges Bernheim bought the painting, who made it available for the Venice Biennale in 1934 . The painting was later owned by the British collector Herbert James Powell Bomford. He loaned the picture to exhibitions in London in 1942 and 1944 and in Dublin in 1948. The painting came into the possession of Jean d'Alayer in Paris via the art dealer Marlborough Fine Arts in London in the 1950s. In 1959, the New York art dealer Sam Salz sold the picture to the American collector Paul Mellon , who donated it to the National Gallery of Art in 1995.

literature

  • Françoise Cachin : Manet . DuMont, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7701-2791-9 .
  • Galerie Matthiessen (ed.): Exhibition Edouard Manet, 1832–1883, paintings, pastels, watercolors, drawings. Matthiessen Gallery, Berlin 1928.
  • Mary G. Morton: Intimate impressionism from the National Gallery of Art . National Gallery of Art, Washington 2014, ISBN 978-0-89468-386-2 .
  • Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Manet - Seeing: The view of modernity . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2016, ISBN 978-3-7319-0325-3 .
  • John Rewald : French paintings from the collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon and Mrs. Mellon Bruce . National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 1966.
  • Robert Rosenblum: The dog in art . Passagen Verlag, Vienna 1989, ISBN 3-900767-41-6 .
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet, Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German image title according to Hamburger Kunsthalle (ed.): Manet - See: Der Blick der Moderne , p. 179. Further image titles can be found, for example, in the catalog Galerie Matthiessen (ed.): Exhibition Edouard Manet : The Japanese dog Tama on p. 32 and the little dog Tama as captions on plate 34.
  2. ↑ Robert Rosenblum: The dog in art , p. 52.
  3. ↑ Referred to as a “living souvenir” in Robert Rosenblum: Der Hund in der Kunst , p. 52.
  4. ↑ Robert Rosenblum: The dog in art , p. 51.
  5. ↑ Robert Rosenblum: The dog in art , p. 56.