Stop 1007

NARRATOR: You’ll find no details to point to this sitter’s profession—no tools of his trade, no stodgy library or other masculine setting. Instead, this man with a twinkle in his eye is depicted in front of a soft wall covering.

EMILY BEENY: This sort of airy, pink, floral textile is one that appears in the backgrounds of several of Manet’s pastel nudes. 

NARRATOR: Abandoning his more typical medium of oil paint, Manet used pastels to create this portrait. In Manet’s hands, the medium—then thought of as more feminine or genteel than oil paint—takes on a new quality.

EMILY BEENY: So these sort of zigzagging, whiskery kind of strokes that he uses, the black marks that create the sort of crow’s-feet on his sitters face, or the scratchiness of his mustache or his thinning hair. The graphic quality of that mark making is something quite different from what we see in most contemporary pastels.

NARRATOR: Artists traditionally applied pastels to a thick blue paper; the powdery medium would adhere best to the roughened surface as the artist built up layers of color. Here, Manet uses a fine-weave linen canvas, which had a texture that enhanced a more graphic effect. 

EMILY BEENY: It allowed him, potentially, to take a damp cloth or black soap and wipe away and rework.  Because Manet for all the apparent spontaneity of his work, in terms of its appearance, was all about reworking, was all about doing it a million times in order to get it to look as though it had been created at the first go.