Madame Manet
1874–1876
Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883)
Oil on canvas
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Mr. Norton Simon
Manet met his future wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, in 1850, when she arrived in his parents’ household as a piano teacher. Before their marriage, Suzanne served as the model for Manet’s first history painting, and she continued through the succeeding decades to sit for private portraits like this one, painted in the mid-1870s. Capturing the quiet beauty and famously even temper of its subject, this picture also demonstrates a new freshness and informality of handling: Manet’s response to the emerging Impressionist style, particularly the work of Berthe Morisot.
A Trio of Treatments: Conserving Manet’s Madame Manet
How do you restore an unfinished painting? That is one of the many questions Chief Curator Emily Talbot poses to Devi Ormond, Associate Conservator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, during an interview about her work in 2019 on Manet’s sketch-like portrait of his wife. Ormond studied the painting under ultraviolet light and conducted infrared reflectography to identify past restorations and isolate damaged areas before painstakingly removing old inpainting and discolored varnish. In their conversation, Talbot and Ormond hypothesize about the motivations for painting over Manet’s work and propose an explanation for the horizontal lines near Madame Manet’s shoulder.
