Woman Reading, about 1880-81, Édouard Manet, oil on canvas
The Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933.435
Transcript
NARRATOR: Here, a young woman reads a magazine, and—almost out of frame to the left—we see her foamy mug of beer on a marble-topped table. Curator Emily Beeny.
EMILY BEENY: She’s dressed for the outdoors in this wonderful, plush hat and this frothy fichu collar as well as these splendidly wet-in-wet painted gloves.
NARRATOR: These clues—the drink, her attire, even the wooden stick attached to the magazine—tell us she is seated at an outdoor café, and it’s chilly outside, maybe even winter. Now, take a look at the background.
EMILY BEENY: We have a sort of sun dappled path, all of this lush greenery, a hint actually of a watering can on the right-hand side of the background. And hints of red flowers, very freely painted.
NARRATOR: Between her winter wear and the spring flowers, it becomes clear this scene was staged. That blossoming garden in the background? Actually it was from one of Manet’s recent paintings he had hung on his studio wall as a backdrop. This same gravel path and the slender tree trunks in the upper right appear in Manet’s painting, The Promenade, hanging nearby.
EMILY BEENY: So it’s a carefully crafted fiction that I think is very much about the artist wanting to perform spontaneity, to convince us that he has this ability to observe rapidly and effortlessly out in the world.
NARRATOR: By now Manet was paralyzed in his left leg and not mobile enough to visit the cafes he once frequented.
EMILY BEENY: So café life comes to him. A lot of people he used to go meet at Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes stream into his studio to watch him work. The café and studio become interchangeable.
NARRATOR: There’s one final trace of his artifice in the upper left canvas, just above the magazine. Here longer, vertical gold or yellow brushstrokes may conceal the frame of the previously painted garden scene.
EMILY BEENY: Evidence that Manet had actually framed this landscape before hanging it on the wall of his studio. And then essentially painted out the frame to convince us that we’re looking out through a window.