Manet's 'Le Printemps'
This month our featured artist is the French painter, Edouard Manet. He was born on 23 January 1832 (died 30 April 1883). Below you can read a short description of his masterpiece, Le Printemps (Spring), that was sold in November 2014.
Picture from: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/jeanne-spring/ewHUkby4MoOrrw?hl=en-GB
"From the mid-1860s until his final year, Manet was the pioneer and leading exemplar of a revolutionary new style and its contemporary content. This portrait of the actress Jeanne Demarsy, cast as an allegory of spring, is the very climax of Manet’s approach in his painting to femininity and fashion, consummately manifest in the artist’s ground-breaking modern painterly style. Le Printemps, completed in 1881 and offered here, was one of two paintings the artist submitted to the Salon of 1882; the other was his supreme masterpiece, Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1881-1882. This masterpiece comes completely fresh to the market, having remained in the same collection for over a century, and most recently, on loan for the last two decades to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C."
“Manet’s defenders are delirious, his detractors stupefied.”
– Maurice du Seigneur, “L’Artiste,” 1 June 1882
“It is one of the best, the most original and most harmonious paintings Manet has yet produced.”
– Louis de Fourcade, “Le Gaulois,” 4 May 1882
“As a soldier carries his rifle, so she shoulders her grey parasol.”
– Louis de Fourcade, “Le Gaulois,” 4 May 1882
(Quotes from www.christies.com)