Manet
30 Jan - 06 May 2007
MANET
Guest in the collection: La maîtresse de Baudelaire couchée, 1862
30 January 2007 - 06 May 2007
At the present moment, our Sunflowers are guests at the Szépmûvészeti Museum, the art museum in Budapest that is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year with a large Van Gogh exhibition. This museum will also be hosting the large Ferdinand Hodler exhibition which is being prepared for 2008. As a sign of collegial collaboration, the Szépmûvészeti Museum is offering the Museum of Fine Arts Bern the opportunity to host an important work from its collection: Edouard Manet's La maîtresse de baudelaire couchée, 1862.
The portrait is of Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire's (1821-1867) mistress of many years' standing. Little is known about the second-rate mulatta actress who worked on the left bank. Baudelaire had met Duval in 1842 - it was the beginning of a stormy relationship that was to last almost a lifetime. Although the couple separated in 1856, Baudelaire cared touchingly for his "Vénus noire" after she suffered a stroke in 1859. They lived together again from 1860 to 1861. In his collection Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857 and added to later, Baudelaire dedicated a whole cycle of poems to his Creole muse.
When the thirty-year-old Edouard Manet (1832-1883) painted her, Jeanne Duval was already ill and - as can be seen by her awkwardly stretched-out leg - partly paralysed. In a letter to his mother from 11th October 1860, Baudelaire speaks of her as "vieille beauté transformée en infirme". Indeed, Manet's painting does not flatter her in any way: stretched out on a green sofa, her head is inclined slightly and her overlarge right hand rests on the back of the sofa in a somewhat clumsy gesture. Her features, only sketchily portrayed, have a hard expression and her eyes are shadowed.
However, it is not the seemingly small head of the sitter that plays the main role in this painting. The picture is dominated more by the copiously bouffant white crinoline that takes up the material theme of the flowing lace curtains in the window embrasure of the former studio in the Rue Guyot. The informal, impressionistic flow is an indication of Manet's later style of the 1870s. La maîtresse de Baudelaire couchée is the first attempt at this "white painting". It will become a hallmark of the painter and is the first example in his oeuvre of this type of painting - a woman in fashionable and elegant clothes lying on a sofa or bed. This genre was to become very popular and was taken up in various forms by colleagues such as Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. A naked counterpart to the bourgeois ladies in white was the courtesan Olympia (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) painted the following year. It caused a scandal in the Salon in 1865. We are exhibiting an etching of this painting.
Manet and Baudelaire met in 1858 and rapidly became friends, although the poet maintained a somewhat reserved attitude towards the art of Manet who was eleven years younger. Manet portrayed Baudelaire in 1862 in a large painting Musique aux Tuileries (National Gallery, London) strolling among the colourful Parisian society. The characteristic profile of the poet in this painting served later for the delicately sketched etching Baudelaire en chapeau, de profil, a version of which we are also exhibiting in the graphic collection.
Guest in the collection: La maîtresse de Baudelaire couchée, 1862
30 January 2007 - 06 May 2007
At the present moment, our Sunflowers are guests at the Szépmûvészeti Museum, the art museum in Budapest that is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year with a large Van Gogh exhibition. This museum will also be hosting the large Ferdinand Hodler exhibition which is being prepared for 2008. As a sign of collegial collaboration, the Szépmûvészeti Museum is offering the Museum of Fine Arts Bern the opportunity to host an important work from its collection: Edouard Manet's La maîtresse de baudelaire couchée, 1862.
The portrait is of Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire's (1821-1867) mistress of many years' standing. Little is known about the second-rate mulatta actress who worked on the left bank. Baudelaire had met Duval in 1842 - it was the beginning of a stormy relationship that was to last almost a lifetime. Although the couple separated in 1856, Baudelaire cared touchingly for his "Vénus noire" after she suffered a stroke in 1859. They lived together again from 1860 to 1861. In his collection Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857 and added to later, Baudelaire dedicated a whole cycle of poems to his Creole muse.
When the thirty-year-old Edouard Manet (1832-1883) painted her, Jeanne Duval was already ill and - as can be seen by her awkwardly stretched-out leg - partly paralysed. In a letter to his mother from 11th October 1860, Baudelaire speaks of her as "vieille beauté transformée en infirme". Indeed, Manet's painting does not flatter her in any way: stretched out on a green sofa, her head is inclined slightly and her overlarge right hand rests on the back of the sofa in a somewhat clumsy gesture. Her features, only sketchily portrayed, have a hard expression and her eyes are shadowed.
However, it is not the seemingly small head of the sitter that plays the main role in this painting. The picture is dominated more by the copiously bouffant white crinoline that takes up the material theme of the flowing lace curtains in the window embrasure of the former studio in the Rue Guyot. The informal, impressionistic flow is an indication of Manet's later style of the 1870s. La maîtresse de Baudelaire couchée is the first attempt at this "white painting". It will become a hallmark of the painter and is the first example in his oeuvre of this type of painting - a woman in fashionable and elegant clothes lying on a sofa or bed. This genre was to become very popular and was taken up in various forms by colleagues such as Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. A naked counterpart to the bourgeois ladies in white was the courtesan Olympia (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) painted the following year. It caused a scandal in the Salon in 1865. We are exhibiting an etching of this painting.
Manet and Baudelaire met in 1858 and rapidly became friends, although the poet maintained a somewhat reserved attitude towards the art of Manet who was eleven years younger. Manet portrayed Baudelaire in 1862 in a large painting Musique aux Tuileries (National Gallery, London) strolling among the colourful Parisian society. The characteristic profile of the poet in this painting served later for the delicately sketched etching Baudelaire en chapeau, de profil, a version of which we are also exhibiting in the graphic collection.