Manet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mondays with Edouard Manet!

These few images don't represent all the Manet holdings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, of course, but they happen to be my personal favorites from the museum's new digital online collection.

All the narrative text is from the Met descriptions online.

Mademoiselle Victorine Meurent in Espada costume
(1862)

"Manet depicted model Victorine Meurent (1844–1928) in the guise of a male espada, or matador, borrowing her pose from a Renaissance print. Victorine’s shoes are unsuitable for bullfighting, and the pink cape that she flourishes is the wrong hue, but she carries off her role with panache. The backdrop reproduces a scene from Goya’s Tauromaquia series, celebrating the feats of bullfighters. When this painting was exhibited at the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863, a commentator noted, 'Manet loves Spain, and his favorite master seems to be Goya, whose vivid and contrasting hues, whose free and fiery touch he imitates.'"

Young woman with a a parrot, or young woman in a pink peignoir
(1866, Victorine Meurent)

"Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent, had recently posed as the brazen nudes in Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass (both Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Here, appearing relatively demure, she flaunts an intimate silk dressing gown. Critics eyed the painting as a rejoinder to Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot (29.100.57) and as indicative of Manet’s "current vice" of failing to "value a head more than a slipper." Recent scholars have interpreted it as an allegory of the five senses: the nosegay (smell), the orange (taste), the parrot-confidant (hearing), and the man’s monocle she fingers (sight and touch)."

Madame Edouard Manet - Suzanne Leenhoff, 1830-1906
(1866)

"Manet undertook only six portraits of his wife, the Dutch pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, in the years after their marriage in 1863. Half were left unfinished, including the present work, providing rare insight into the artist’s technique. He sketched the figure and background with broad strokes, then turned to the facial features, scraping off the face at least twice, before eventually abandoning the picture."

Mademoiselle Isabelle-Lemonnier, 1857-1926

"Isabelle Lemonnier was the daughter of a successful Parisian jeweler and the younger sister of Marguerite Charpentier, whose grand portrait by Renoir is also in the Metropolitan’s collection (07.122). Between 1879 and 1882 Manet made several portraits of Isabelle, of whom he seems to have been fond; in the summer of 1880 he sent her a series of letters decorated with charming watercolor sketches." (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Mademoiselle Lucie Delabigne, 1859-1910

"This pastel depicts Lucie Delabigne, a fashionable Parisian courtesan who was also the subject of portraits by Jean-Louis Forain, Édouard Detaille, and other artists. Manet may have met her through the writer Émile Zola, who based many passages in his book Nana on observations made at Lucie’s home. The novel was published in 1880, just a year after this work was made." (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Monet family in garden at Argenteuil
(1874)

"In July and August 1874 Manet vacationed at his family’s house in Gennevilliers, just across the Seine from Monet at Argenteuil. The two painters saw each other often that summer, and on a number of occasions they were joined by Renoir. While Manet was painting this picture of Monet with his wife Camille and their son Jean, Monet painted Manet at his easel (location unknown). Renoir, who arrived just as Manet was beginning to work, borrowed paint, brushes, and canvas, positioned himself next to Manet, and painted Madame Monet and Her Son (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)."

The funeral
(1867)

"Manet’s unfinished painting is thought to depict the funeral of the writer Charles Baudelaire, which took place on September 2, 1867. The artist, unlike other friends who had yet to return from vacation or stayed away owing to the threatening summer storm, was among the few mourners present. This view of the meager funeral cortège at the foot of the Butte Mouffetard, a hill in southwest Paris, is framed by the silhouettes of the towers and cupolas of the Val de Grâce, the Panthéon, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and the Tour de Clovis in the background.

"Manet kept the picture until his death. In 1894 Pissarro acquired it in exchange for one of his own landscapes." (Metropolitan Museum of Art)