XV - Works On Paper - Marty de Cambiaire (English)

Édouard Manet
Paris 1832 – 1883
31
Man in a Café-Concert, Wearing a Top Hat, his Hands Resting on his Stick
Brush and black ink, heightened with white gouache
257 x 88 mm (10 x 3 ¼ in.)
PROVENANCE
Suzanne Manet, widow of the artist, bears faint
studio stamp at bottom right (L. 880).
As Juliet Wilson-Bareau has so ingeniously identified,
this is part of a study by Manet after his own painting
(Fig. 1) of 1878 Café-Concert, now in the Walters
Art Gallery, Baltimore. Manet appears to have
made this drawing expressly for publication in the
revue, Le Rapin (figs.2-3), an extremely rare printed
gazette of which only the first issue survives in two
known copies. On page 5, Le Rapin advertised ”une
exposition de dessins, gravures et autres œuvres
en blanc et noir …” held in May of 1881 at the
galleries of the journal L’Art, 33 Avenue de l’Opéra.
Fig. 1 E. Manet, Au Café-Concert, Baltimore, Walters Art
Gallery
The present work, an extraordinary survivor and
a fascinating example of the variety and range of
Manet’s graphic interests, is the right hand half or
section of a highly inventive brush ricordo sketch
of the composition, the left half of which was used
for the journal to fit into the central column of a
three column page and presumably destroyed in the
process. Given the presence of the studio stamp in
the corner, which was always applied by his widow,
this portion of the drawing must have been given
back to Manet.
Manet had exhibited the painting itself in April 1880
at the premises of another gazette, La Vie Moderne.
The exhibition, which included ten oil paintings and
15 pastels, was advertised in the gazette itself with
a drawing of a section from a second café painting
Coin de Café-Concert, made into a guillotage. This
same guillotage process would have been used
for the illustration in Le Rapin. In a letter to Emile
Bergerat written in May 1880, Manet notes that
he has not yet received his drawing Café-Concert
back from La Vie Moderne but adds that he will
make another one, for free for his friend 1 . Manet’s
close involvement with the process of exhibiting
at and creating publicity with these avant-garde
publishing houses is apparent in these drawings and
demonstrates what would then have been a cuttingedge
engagement with developments in graphic
media of his time.
Some years earlier in 1876, he had provided another
wash drawing for an illustration in Le Type, which
announced that Manet’s works were included ‘avec
grand fracas’ …in the Salon of that year. The surviving
examples of these lively illustrations such as those
for La Vie Moderne and Le Rapin show Manet using
a rapid brush and wash technique, eye-catching and
easily decipherable as a characterful impression of
a larger composition, for the black and white format
of a printed journal.
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