Un atelier aux Batignolles
Henri Fantin-Latour , 1870
204 × 273.5 cm
Oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay , Paris
The painting Un atelier aux Batignolles from 1870 is one of a series of group portraits that Henri Fantin-Latour created by artist friends in the second half of the 19th century. The 204 × 273.5 cm picture shows the painter Édouard Manet , surrounded by colleagues and admirers, in a studio in the artists' quarter Quartier des Batignolles . The painting now belongs to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay .
Image description
In one interior is a group of middle-aged men. In the center of the picture sits in front of an easel a man with a palette in his left hand and a brush in his right hand. While the man is shown frontally, only the back of the canvas on which he is applying the brush can be seen. The man looks at the man sitting next to him, whom he seems to be portraying. Meanwhile, the latter directs his gaze to the painting that is being created. Behind these two seated people are six other men. Some of them also look at the painting, others look into the room. All men wear dark suits, only the man at the easel wears light-colored trousers, which underlines his special role. From the interior, next to the light floor, only the dark back wall and the dark left wall can be seen. The ceiling, a door or a window is missing. An empty picture frame hangs on the back wall . On the left wall there is a framed painting, of which only the lower right edge of the picture can be seen and the motif cannot be recognized. Under this painting there is a sideboard on the wall, over which is covered a red cloth that almost reaches the floor. On this sideboard there is an ancient figure (Athena?), A dark vessel (a Japanese lacquer work?) And another object that cannot be clearly recognized. The room is not illuminated by daylight. An artificial light directs its glow from the top right onto the painting man in the center of the picture. In addition to black and white and the red of the ceiling, the picture is mostly kept in shades of brown. The standing people, the various picture frames, the easel and the edges of the sideboard create a vertical and vertical grid in their line extensions.
The people shown
The painter Édouard Manet sits at the easel . Henri Fantin-Latour had already portrayed him in 1867 with a top hat and walking stick in the manner of a noble citizen. Next to Manet is the art critic, journalist, poet, composer, painter and sculptor Zacharie Astruc . Astruc was one of the first defenders of Manet's art. The portrait that Manet seems to be painting of him in this painting was created as early as 1866 and is now in the Kunsthalle Bremen . Behind the two stand from left to right the painters Otto Scholderer and Pierre-Auguste Renoir , the art critic and writer Émile Zola , Renoir's friend and patron Edmond Maître (1840–1898) and the painters Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet .
The studio in Batignolles
The Batignolles district in Paris developed into a place to live and work that was popular with artists in the 1860s. In addition to Fantin-Latour, the other painters depicted had their studios in this quarter. The picture Frédéric Bazille's The Atelier on Rue La Condamine , created in the same year, shows a realistic reproduction of his workplace, which he shared with Renoir from 1868 to 1870. The common meeting point of the sitters, however, was less an atelier than the nearby Café Guerbois . Fierce discussions took place here about the renewal of painting in contrast to academic painting. The sharp-tongued Manet was seen by critics as the leader of a new school in painting. Based on the Barbizon School , the name Batignolles School was created for the group of young painters . The New Painting that developed in the 1860s was only given the name Impressionism in the 1870s .
Henri Fantin-Latour
Fantin-Latour, known above all for his fruit and flower still lifes, painted several group portraits as well as several individual portraits. As early as 1864 he created the painting Hommage à Delacroix , in which he grouped a circle of friends of painters and writers around a portrait of the late painter Eugène Delacroix . In this picture he portrayed himself as the painter of the picture, but lined up with his friends and renounced a prominent role as he assigned to Manet in the Un atelier aux Batignolles . Fantin-Latour took up the topic of group portraits again in 1872 with Le Coin de table . Here he gathered a group of writers around Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud around a table . Musicians finally play the main role in the painting Autour du piano from 1885 , in which Emmanuel Chabrier is the main character seated at the piano. All of these group portraits appear arranged and, due to their lack of liveliness, show a compositional relationship to the painter's still lifes.
Effects
The young generation of painters depicted in the painting was largely known in Paris at the end of the 1860s, but so far without any notable success with the public and critics. After the scandals surrounding the paintings Breakfast in the Green in 1863 in the Salon des Refusés and Olympia in 1865 in the Paris Salon , Manet became a kind of leading figure as an innovator in art for some of his younger painters and writers. The new painting has been repeatedly attacked and their protagonists had the reputation of revolutionaries. In the Un atelier aux Batignolles , Fantin-Latour tried to portray the painters, also known as “Bande à Manet”, as serious artists and members of the bourgeoisie . The well-dressed people are completely calm and focused. The classic statue on the sideboard refers to tradition and role models in art. Nothing can be seen of the New Painting : a picture frame is empty, a picture is only shown with a small corner and the viewer only sees the back of the supposedly emerging painting. Fantin-Latour's painting style is traditional and is reminiscent of 17th century Dutch paintings. With this painting he tried to underline the seriousness of his painter friends and to avoid any appearance of rebellion. However, the painting exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1870 did not achieve the desired effect. A contemporary caricature on Un atelier aux Batignolles is titled "Jesus painting surrounded by his disciples, or Manet's divine school". The text in the drawing, “Manet t'es sel thecel phare est ce”, literally translates as “Manet, who you are the spirit itself. .. a beacon. .. ". The French original text, however, resembles, spoken aloud, the biblical " Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin " ( counted, weighed and divided ). This prophecy of doom, however, was the opposite of Fantin-Latour's request.
Success for the painter friends did not come about until the end of the 1870s and Fantin-Latour's painting certainly did not contribute to this. The picture does not represent a real studio and therefore does not convey a contemporary snapshot like Bazille's studio picture. The painting shows, however, the friendly connections between the represented artists at the end of the Second Empire and Manet's role as a pioneer of Impressionism . He did not paint himself as an artist until the late 1870s as a self-portrait with a palette .
literature
- Douglas Druick, Michel Hoog: Fantin-Latour . Exhibition catalog Paris 1982 ISBN 2-7118-0208-6
- Gary Tinterow , Henri Loyrette : Origins of Impressionism . New York 1994 ISBN 0-87099-718-1
- Pierre Schneider: Manet and his time . Amsterdam 1972–1985 ISBN 90-6182-038-3
Web links
- Image description (French)
Footnotes
- ↑ Musée d'Orsay: Bazille's studio
- ↑ Pierre Schneider: Manet and his time p. 82