Image(s): Left/Wikipedia/Right/Private Collection
The small sheet measures 20.5 centimetres by 17.5 centimetres. Artforum, by contrast, links the figure to a street urchin in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe from 1863, and the Guardian notes that Manet’s red chalk studies relate to that painting too. Ultraviolet analysis revealed Manet’s faded studio stamp in the lower right-hand corner, a detail Artforum also highlights as key proof.
The discovery began when Francesco Baccanelli, an art historian who specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings and prints from Lombardy and Veneto, visited a modest and little-known private collection in northern Italy, according to The Guardian. Baccanelli told The Guardian that he was captivated at once and grew more convinced of the attribution the longer he studied it. Beeny told the Guardian that the drawing shows abrupt shifts between light and shadow and peculiar plump, tapered fingers, which she called little habits typical of the painter. Beeny said she felt an immediate sense of recognition on first seeing a photograph, something she had not experienced with the many supposed Manet works people send her. Manet’s “The Old Musician” (Image: Wikipedia) The child resembles a street urchin in The Old Musician, the painting in which Manet sought to show the humanity of homeless and marginalised people. Beeny said it is possible the same sitter posed for the little girl with a very similar hairstyle standing on the left in the finished canvas. Beeny told the Guardian that this suggests he took time and effort over it and was pleased with the result. Beeny, whose exhibitions include Manet and Modern Beauty, staged by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago, told the Guardian she is unsure when an unpublished Manet drawing last surfaced, but it has certainly been many years.
The owner showed him an inscription on the back of the mount naming Manet as the artist, yet no art historian had ever examined the sheet. He then sent photographs to Emily Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honour at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, whom he regards as one of the world’s leading Manet experts. Several strands of evidence support the attribution. Style points the same way. Artforum adds that the sheet sits comfortably beside the scores of red chalk preparatory sketches Manet produced in the mid-nineteenth century. The sitter’s identity remains unknown. Beeny and Baccanelli mention Alexandre, a youth hired in the late 1850s to clean Manet’s brushes and palettes who occasionally posed, but they note the figure appears to be a girl of perhaps six. The drawing was sold twice in the 1930s, first in Germany and then in Switzerland, yet it never appeared in scholarly publications on the artist. Beeny and Baccanelli will publish their findings in the October issue of the Burlington Magazine, where they concede that the drawing’s original purpose and early history remain unclear. no such composition by Manet is known Although the sheet is squared for transfer to a canvas. She hopes it will be included in the next edition of the definitive Manet catalogue raisonné, produced by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which has not yet studied the drawing. For admirers of French modernism, the find offers a rare window into Manet’s working methods. The drawing is typical of the red chalk life studies he made in the 1850s and 1860s, shaped by his close study of Renaissance draughtsmanship in Florence, and similar sketches relate to Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as well as The Old Musician. Until the Wildenstein Plattner Institute studies the sheet, the attribution remains a scholarly proposal rather than a settled verdict.
