Édouard ManetFrench, 1832–1883Marguerite de Conflans
May one see it?
Unknown
Paris, France
The owner is known; whether it is on view today is not.
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the painting
Portrait of Marguerite de Conflans is a c.1876 oval oil on canvas portrait by the French painter Édouard Manet. It is owned by the Musée d’Orsay, though it is on display in the red salon at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. Like A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, the work mimics Ingres in its use of a mirror to show the figure from several angles, a motif rarely used by Manet.
It is one of Manet's five portraits of Marguerite de Conflans, the earliest dating to 1873. He asked her to sit again and again, meeting her at receptions organised by his wife, to which de Conflans came with her mother.
Read on
It was first owned by Madamoiselle d'Angély, the subject's daughter, who left it to the Louvre in 1941. It entered that museum's collection officially in 1945. It was later assigned to the musée d'Orsay when that museum opened in 1986 - later the same year it was exchanged for Isidore Pils's The Death of a Sister of Charity from the Musée des Augustins. It was restored in 2005, enabling structural analysis of the canvas - the edges were worn but the canvas was still supple. The wooden frame seems not to be the original.
Particulars
- Accession number
- RF 1945 4
In the catalog
Sources
- Wikidata
- Image: Musée d'Orsay — Didier Descouens · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Meanwhile, in the life of Édouard Manet
The whole life1870s
Refuses to exhibit with the Impressionists
Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, Manet resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions: he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity and held that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Salon.
1874
“The Railway”: ridicule at the Salon of 1874
“The Railway”, painted in 1873, puzzled visitors and critics at the Salon of 1874: its subject seemed baffling, its composition incoherent and its execution sketchy; caricaturists ridiculed it, and only later was it recognised as a symbol of modernity. The model was Victorine Meurent, for the last time.
1874
Morisot marries Manet's brother
In 1874 Berthe Morisot married Manet's brother Eugène and became his sister-in-law; it has been speculated that there was a repressed love between Manet and Morisot, exemplified by the numerous portraits he made of her before her marriage.
1874–1876
The Salon jury rejects his paintings again
In 1874 the jury rejected “Masked Ball at the Opera”, and in 1876 both paintings Manet sent. Independent exhibitions in those years brought nothing but public censure and the mockery of critics.
1875
Lithographs for Poe's “The Raven” in Mallarmé's translation
In 1875 a book-length French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Raven” appeared, with lithographs by Manet and a translation by his friend Stéphane Mallarmé.
1877
Manet's studio hosts a republican meeting
Of public figures Manet admired most the republican Léon Gambetta. In the heat of the seize mai coup in 1877 he opened up his atelier to a republican electoral meeting chaired by Gambetta's friend Eugène Spuller.
