In the Company of Others Manet’s Personal Opinions of Marriage Translated to the Canvas By Jennifer E. Henel Bachelor of Arts -Art History, May 2002, The College of William and Mary A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts May 17, 2009 Thesis directed by Lilien F. Robinson Professor of Art History © Copyright 2009 by Jennifer E. Henel All rights reserved ii Dedication I wish to dedicate this thesis to my family: my parents, Steve, Jane & Brian, for their continual love and support. Thank you for getting me to where I am today! And thanks are especially deserving of my patient and loving husband, Christian- without whom this thesis would not be possible. Thank you for the proofreading! This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Philip Conisbee, who encouraged me to have confidence in my own theories. iii Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge my professor and advisor, Lilien F. Robinson, for her thorough proofreading, editing and guidance on this project, as well as my second reader, Professor Barbara von Barghahn. Additionally, I wish to acknowledge my supervisors Jennifer Cipriano, Kara Mullins, Ann Robertson and professor and supervisor, Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., for their patience during my scholarship. Thank you! To Arthur - thank you for allowing me to continue my scholarship! iv Table of Contents Dedication iii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vi Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Part I – Manet Externally Chapter 2: Marriage & Parisian Society 4 Chapter 3: Adultery & Mistresses 11 Chapter 4: The Chase 19 Chapter 5: Marriage 21 Part II: Manet Internally Chapter 6: Manet’s Family 26 Chapter 7: Manet’s Female Relationships 29 Chapter 8: Manet’s Fate 37 Chapter 9: Conclusion 40 Figures 42 Bibliography 52 v List of Figures 1. Edouard Manet. Music in the Tuileries. 1862. oil on canvas. National Gallery, London 2. Auguste Renoir. Moulin de la Galette. 1876. oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris 3. Edouard Manet. Baudelaire's Mistress, Reclining. 1862. oil on canvas, Szépmuvészeti Múzeum, Budapest 4. Edouard Manet, Nana, 1877, oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg 5. Edouard Manet. The Masked Ball at the Opera. c.1873-1874. oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 6. Edouard Manet. Chez le Père Lathuille. 1879. Oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai 7. Edouard Manet. In the Conservatory. 1879. oil on canvas. Nationalgalerie, Berlin 8. Edouard Manet. At the Beach. 1873. oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris 9. Edouard Manet. The Monet Family in their Garden at Argenteuil, 1874, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 10. Edouard Manet. Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Manet. 1860. oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris 11. Edouard Manet. Surprised Nymph. (Nymphe surprise). 1861. oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires 12. Rembrandt van Rijn. Bathsheba at Her Bath. 1654. oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris vi 13. Edouard Manet. Portrait of Eva Gonzales. 1870. oil on canvas, National Gallery, London 14. Edouard Manet. Le Repose. 1870. Oil on canvas. RISD, Providence 15. Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Fan, 1872, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay 16. Edouard Manet. The Balcony. 1868-69. Oil on canvas. Musee d'Orsay, Paris 17. Edouard Manet. Reading. 1969. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris 18. Edouard Manet. Madame Manet in the Conservatory. 1876. Oil on canvas. Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo 19. Edouard Manet. Mme. Manet at the Piano. 1868. Oil on canvas. Musée d'Orsay, Paris 20. Edgar Degas, Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Manet. 1869. Oil on canvas. Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyushu vii In the Company of Others: Manet’s Personal Opinions of Marriage Translated to the Canvas Chapter 1: Introduction Edouard Manet's search for truth in painting resulted in his reality brought to canvas. Manet's paintings present figurative scenes with varying agendas and subject matter. Although the primary consideration when viewing Manet’s work should be the scene on the canvas, it is impossible to completely divorce the artist- especially his personal motivations- from his art. In 1867, Émile Zola wrote that Manet painted "in a way that is wholly naïve, yet wholly thought out… plac[ing] himself in front of nature with naïveté."1 This naïveté may be better described as the artist’s personal truth in painting- his own reality. As John House explains, “in looking at Manet's art, we have to define the conventional cultural codes from which he sought to free himself; it was his rejection and subversion of these which proved to his detractors that he could not paint, and at the same time led his supporters to view his work as a truthful natural form of painting."2 Nonetheless, however truthful Manet’s painting was, he never freed himself entirely from those outside cultural conventions. One of those conventions which confined Manet was the institution of marriage in bourgeois culture. This paper seeks to explore Manet’s struggle to reconcile his personal search for truth in his painting with his personal discontent with marriage. I propose this discontent 1Zola, as quoted in John House's essay, "Manet's Naïveté." in The Hidden Face of Manet, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 997, Apr., 1986. House notes that Baudelaire had defined "naïveté" as ''knowledge [of one's craft] giving the principal role to temperament.'" p. 2- E. Zola: "Edouard Manet,' Revue de XIX siècle , 1 January 1867, quoted in Mon Salon, Manet, Ecrits sur l'art, Paris, 1970;, pp. 95-96-101; C. Baudelaire, Salon de 1846 and "Le Peintre de la vie moderne." Le Figaro. 26, 29 November, 3 December 1863, quoted in Ecrits sur l'art, Paris 1971 I. pp. 144, 162, 250; II, p. 144. 2 House, "Manet's Naïveté," pp. 2-3. 1 with the institution of marriage led Manet to depict his married couples in a detached bourgeois manner,3 while his paintings of unmarried liaisons often project a level of personal interaction between men and women. Through the early nineteenth century and continuing through the 1860s, most Parisian families continued to adopt the Prudhommian (or traditional) model of a male-led household with a female as the object of her husband’s adornment. However, the Napoleonic laws established between 1801 and 1803 gave more relative equality to some women within their marriages.4 Despite this advance for women, Manet remained firmly planted in the misogynistic camp when it came to marriage. As a result, his paintings portray marriage not as a leveling playing field, but as an unspoken prison.5 Judging from these depictions, it appears that, for Manet, marriage did not create a union between a man and a woman; rather, it forced division between a man and a woman, causing them to lead highly individualized lives under the guise of a joint household. In this paper I assert that Manet’s paintings make manifest his silent attitudes towards marriage. In his depictions of married couples, Manet’s use of a strong line of division separating his figures, and his frequent placement of the male and female figures on two different pictorial planes emphasizes their individuality, as well as the constraint exerted upon them by the “bond” of marriage. In strong contrast, some of Manet’s 3 I mean to illustrate that Manet depicted life of the times; in bourgeois culture in France during the 1800s, married couples maintained separate spaces. See further in the paper for discussion on the roles of husband and wife in Parisian bourgeois society. 4 Louise Hicks. “Women and the Code Napoléon.” Research Subjects: 19th Century Society, The Napoleon Series (c.1995 – 2005). http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/society/c_women.html (accessed 12/3/2006). 5 This viewpoint of Manet does not accurately coincide with his interactions with female contemporaries such as fellow artist Eva Gonzalès, who studied under Manet during the same period as Manet’s increased professional interaction with Morisot. In fact, Manet supported his student’s work and demonstrated this by depicting her as an artist in a portrait he painted in 1870. 2 paintings of unmarried male and female interaction give an illusion of greater intimacy than those of their married counterparts. Ultimately, Manet failed to reconcile these divergent views, in his canvases or in his life. Observations of the artist's contemporaries on Manet's marriage and romantic liaisons also shed light on this struggle. 3 PART 1 - MANET EXTERNALLY Chapter 2: Marriage & Parisian Society Gender roles in nineteenth-century France underwent a great deal of change over the course of the century. During the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women had taken up arms along side men as the country sought new government.6 Soon thereafter, the Napoleonic Code established between 1801 and 1804 encouraged greater male-female equality, but women were not afforded any equality with men, in terms of economic, political or social rights.7 Later in the nineteenth century, as Griselda Pollock notes "the economic and social conditions of the existence of the bourgeoisie as a class [was] structurally founded upon inequality and difference in terms of the socio-economic categories and of gender."8 Priscilla Schwarz also notes the restrictions in the late nineteenth century under Napoléon III: "Where women in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century had greater involvement with handling the family's affairs, business, and finances and could venture out into public urban spaces, women in the middle of the century and later were increasingly confined to a private world evermore detached from the public."9 Marriage in Parisian bourgeois society during the reign of Napoléon III most often involved arranged matches.