His future sister-in-law Berthe Morisot, who first met him in the Louvre in 1868, recorded his demeanour at the following year’s Salon, the setting for so many of his torments. Manet recalled their encounter as a duel involving an inconclusive exchange of bullets.Ĭontemporaries remembered Manet’s charming temperament. That Manet should have adopted and been defeated by his overambitious project – the portrait was left unfinished – speaks to the intense rivalry between the two. Manet reciprocated with a life-size plein air portrait of Carolus-Duran as swaggering country squire (1876). and Mme Edouard Manet, from 1868-69 while Carolus-Duran, the successful society portraitist, left two tentative and thoughtful head-and-shoulders studies. His correspondence is businesslike, lively and amusing rather than introspective or revelatory, and unlike, say, Van Gogh, Manet only painted a couple of self-portraits.īut he was a handsome man, as several painter friends testified: Fantin-Latour painted him in Atelier in Les Batignolles in 1870 at the centre of a group of admirers Degas captured him in relaxed, debonair pose in M. Manet’s many portraits of other, more glamorous, women such as Isabelle Lemonnier and Madame Guillemet betray his roving eye and attraction to the svelte ladies of his circle.įor an idea of Manet himself, we largely have to rely on others. Why, one wonders, did Manet saddle himself with this readymade family to which no further children were added? Why did he wait until his father’s death to marry Suzanne? He was clearly fond of both, but if Léon was the result of his own youthful indiscretions, as is sometimes suggested, why was he never legitimised? Suzanne regularly appears in Manet’s work, such as Mme Manet in the Conservatory (1879) but the artist does not disguise her increasing corpulence. She had given birth to an illegitimate son in 1852, Léon Koëlla Leenhoff, whose paternity is uncertain and was passed off as her younger brother. In 1860 he set up home with Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutchwoman who had taught the piano to his younger brothers. He was the lynchpin of his social network and each portrait – be it of family members, fellow artists, musicians, actors, actresses, politicians or art critics – adds something to our still incomplete understanding of the artist.Ĭuriously, questions still remain about the basic facts of Manet’s life. For the common denominator linking Manet’s portraits is the artist himself. The roll-call of Manet’s sitters cuts a fascinating swathe through Parisian society of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, at one level offering us a highly idiosyncratic sampling of the capital’s haute bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, on another, a glimpse into Manet’s own world. Not only did he pick and choose his models, he innovated with sharper lighting, more natural poses and working alla prima (wet on wet paint), then scraping back the paint, rather than making deadening revisions to his bold brushwork. Happily, Manet took on remarkably few portrait commissions, thus retaining control over the undertaking, bringing it to a flourishing conclusion or, on occasion, abandoning his attempt. Commissioned portraits often tell us more about the aesthetic ideas and fashions of an era than about the artist.
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