Manet in love

The title of Manet: A Model Family (Princeton), the catalogue of the recent exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, is an ironic pun.  The family frequently posed as his models, but were far from the typical haut bourgeois.  Father and son were both paralysed by tertiary syphilis, and Edouard suffered an agonising death.  His wife had a son of indeterminate paternity. This book does not discuss the fourth and even more intriguing mystery: Manet’s intimate relations with the well-born, beautiful and talented painter Berthe Morisot.

In the portrait of his parents, Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet (1860), his seated paralysed father, dressed entirely in Spanish black, has a black judge’s toque, a full black and grey beard, and a clenched right fist.  With a fierce, furious expression, the dying man turns away from his wife.  With her hand in a basket of fabrics, she hovers solicitously over him.  This revealing and devastating picture publicly displayed the emotional tensions, inner loneliness and repressed anger within the family.  Manet lived secretly with Suzanne Leenhoff and her son Léon for three years, but did not marry her until his father died.

Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Manet (1860) by Édouard Manet

In 1849 Suzanne, three years older than Manet, became the piano teacher of the family’s three teenage sons.  Suzanne was born in Holland in 1829, Léon was born 23 years later in 1852, a bit of a stretch for him to be politely called her younger brother, but the right age for him to be her son.  Praised by Franz Liszt but twice rejected by the Paris Conservatoire, she was a talented but not a professional pianist.  A contributor to the catalogue declares that “a respectable bourgeois lady could not go on the stage”. But many bourgeois women — including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Fanny Claus, whom Manet portrayed in The Balcony — did perform publicly.

 There is strong evidence to suggest that Auguste Manet was in fact Léon’s father, which would make Léon both Edouard’s stepson and his half-brother.  Manet knew his father had syphilis and he eventually inherited that disease.  Fearful of passing it on to his wife and children, he was reluctant to have a child of his own.  The estrangement, fear and barely suppressed rage in his portrait of his parents may have been provoked by the shameful secret surrounding Léon’s paternity and by Manet’s bitter resentment of having to step into the shoes of his father, a prominent but hypocritical high-court judge.

Madame Manet at the Piano (1868) shows Suzanne in profile (the only way a pianist could be portrayed) in front of gold-framed wall panels and an elaborate gold clock on the mantle.  The back of her chair props her up and her shadow is cast on the wall. She has pale skin and a red-tipped nose, and wears a black dress with transparent sleeves.  She’s not playing from memory, but reads the music as her delicate fingers dance on the keys.

Édouard Manet – Madame Manet ou Piano – 2

In a notorious quarrel of 1869, Manet swore that his close friend Edgar Degas had distorted the features of his dear wife in his dual portrait of M. and Mme. Edouard Manet .  Retaliating with an act of brutal vandalism and symbolic execution of his friend, he slashed out a third of the picture, obliterated the front of Suzanne’s face and body as well as her hands and the piano she was playing.  Since there is no intimacy in this picture, Manet was not outraged “by a moment of realistic intimacy”.  He took offence, not only at Degas’ portrayal of Suzanne’s face but also at the portrait of himself, which made him look like a philistine, bored and dozing off on the sofa during his wife’s performance.  The catalogue, comparing this painting to Degas’ Interior: The Rape, states  that “both paintings show a man with a hand in his pocket, staring at the back of a woman.”  But Degas’ “ Interior is filled with tension and fear”; his calm, almost soporific painting of the Manets does not portray these intense emotions.

Hilton Als’ brief essay contains notable  errors.  He maintains that the young Manet had “no clear idea of why he’d been sent away” on a voyage to Brazil.  In fact, he sailed to gain experience that would ease his admission to the French Navy.  Manet’s exotic voyage to Rio de Janeiro was like Baudelaire’s to Mauritius, Degas’ to New Orleans and Gauguin’s to Tahiti.  Als also claims that the portrait of Manet’s mother has “great vivacity”.  In fact, she has a hairy face and a harsh, severe, almost frozen expression.  Als’ essay, perhaps written for another occasion, repeats familiar material and doesn’t fit in with the tone or structure of this book.

Art historians have been trained to look at paintings with preconceived notions and try to enhance their pictorial meaning by connecting them to works by earlier artists.  They do not follow Hamlet’s valuable advice, “Look here upon this picture, and on this,” and fail to see what is actually there.  Instead, they often make far-fetched and unconvincing comparisons larded with speculative words: perhaps, apparently, something similar, most likely, seems like, seems ready, seems to be, appears to be and may have thought. 

There’s no evidence, for example, in Madame Edouard Manet on a Blue Sofa that she “has apparently just returned from an outing”.  If so, she would not have placed her dirty shoes on the sofa.  Suzanne Holding a Jug portrays a simple household task that is very different from Titian’s complex Allegory of Marriage, with a bearded knight in armour, two other women and a winged cupid.

Portrait of Madame Edouard Manet on a blue sofa (1874) – Edouard Manet

A contributor asserts that “the mood of an early Degas portrait of Manet is strikingly similar to the mood of Degas’ depiction of [his brother] Achille in A Cotton Office in New Orleans ”. In fact, they are very different.  Manet is bareheaded, stands straight up, looks forward and puts his hand in his pocket.  Achille, wearing a hat, leans forward, looks down and plunges his hands into a mass of cloudy cotton.

A Cotton Office in New Orleans. Artist,by Edgar Degas, 1873

Another misguided scholar declares that “ Madame Manet at the Piano bears a striking resemblance to Whistler’s At the Piano .”  Once again, a careful look reveals that the two pictures are quite different.  Manet does not have Whistler’s heavy gold-framed paintings on the back wall, red carpet on the floor and pretty little girl in a flouncy white dress leaning on the piano.  Though a woman plays a harpsichord in Vermeer’s The Concert, there’s even less of a striking resemblance to that picture.

At the Piano, by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, 1859

Contradictions occur concerning Suzanne’s finances and her precarious widowhood.  “After Edouard’s death, Eugénie—the painter’s mother—was iron-willed, even cruel, with her daughter-in-law.  Suzanne, left with Edouard’s debts, was disinherited by her mother-in-law,” who bitterly resented her sexual involvement and illegitimate son with Eugénie’s husband, Auguste Manet.  “From then on, Suzanne lived in poverty in a house in Gennevilliers,” eight miles northwest of Paris. But another contributor states that in 1889 the supposedly destitute Suzanne could afford to “welcome her newly widowed sister Marthe, and Marthe’s son, into her home”.

The editor’s Acknowledgments gush immodestly and inappropriately about the exceptional team, the excellent essays and excellent contributions, the (scarcely believable) incredible knowledge and incredible research assistant.  The catalogue entries seem unaware of the introductory essays and keep reiterating familiar information.  It would have been far more useful for an expert editor to identify the thirteen contributors, to eliminate their tedious repetition, to correct the contradictions and eliminate the fanciful comparisons.  The editor herself calls attention to the superfluous repetitions by stating, “As described and analyzed at length elsewhere in this volume, Suzanne entered the orbit of the Manet family as a piano teacher.” 

Suzanne in Reading (1868-73) is similar to Berthe in Repose .  Both women are seated on a wide couch wearing a black necklace, black belt and billowing white dress.  Their arms and spread fingers are in exactly the same position.  In the intentional comparison, Morisot is infinitely more attractive than even the idealised Suzanne.  Facing the viewer, she has large eyes, rosy cheeks and full lips.  Her jet necklace is reprised in her black belt.  Spiky leaves of a plant jut out menacingly at her as if she were threatened by her rival.  She ignores the man standing behind her, leaning on the sofa, looking down at his book and reading silently to himself rather than audibly to her.  He has a sharply indented and jutting Punchinello chin and a long narrow bulbous-tipped nose, and looks older than 16, Léon’s age when Manet began this picture.  Despite the contributor’s claim, this man is not based on Léon, who appears in The Luncheon (1868) with a broad nose, full lips and flat chin.

Claude Monet: The Luncheon, 1868

Manet’s two great portraits of Berthe Morisot illuminate their personal relations.

In Repose (1871), Berthe has a vaguely sketched painting above her head that looks like a coast with boats in the harbor and ships at sea.  Long dark girlish tresses descend along her shoulders down to her chest.  Her dress is tightly bound at the waist and billows at the hips.  Both hands are extended as she reclines on a soft brown sofa.  One holds a fan and rests on the arm, the other with enticingly spread fingers rests on the seat.  One white-stockinged and black-slippered foot steals out from beneath her multi-layered gown.  She has large eyes, sensuous lips, delicate features, full breasts and a sweet expression.  Resting yet alert, she is gentle, tender and engaging.

Édouard Manet – Le repos,1871

The second portrait, Berthe Morisot (1869-73), is dramatic and absolutely stunning.  The contributor doesn’t mention that it is exactly contemporary with Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s fetishistic novel Venus in Furs (1870).  Morisot is swathed in a heavy, pyramidal, brown fur coat that touches the edge of her dark hair and extends from her neck to her thighs at the bottom of the picture.  Her hands are plunged into the kind of thick, furry, sexy, suggestive muff that would fascinate and comfort Gregor Samsa’s hot belly in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis .  Morisot’s head is lavishly topped with a tall beribboned hat, and wild strands of her hair flow down to her eye, cheek and ear.  Seen in three-quarter view, she has pale skin, dark eyes, delicate straight nose and slightly open red lips.  These two sensual portraits are clearly Manet’s tributes to a woman he madly loved.

Berthe Morisot, c. 1869-73, Edouard Manet

Proud of her slim but shapely figure, Berthe was jealous of the dumpy, lower-class Suzanne who spoke French with a guttural Dutch accent.  Noticing that she had gained even more weight, she mocked his unfortunate wife and remarked that “Manet was laboring to make of that monster something slender and interesting!” and “left today with his fat Suzanne for Holland”.

Manet’s portraits of Morisot strongly suggest they were lovers.  He admired her work, relished her conversation and fell in love with her.  Often alone together in his studio, they had ample time for intimacy.  They burned each other’s letters when she married his younger brother—a vicarious substitute—both because they had something to hide and as a sign that their sexual relations had come to an end.

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel , The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis , Impressionist Quartet , Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real .

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