Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Le Printemps
oil on canvas, 29 1/8 x 20 1/4 in. (74 x 51.5 cm.), painted in 1881
Estimate: $25-35 million
Christie’s to sell Manet’s ‘Le Printemps’ Christie’s will offer for sale the acclaimed ‘Le Printemps’ by Edouard Manet as a highlight of the Fall auction season. It will be included in the Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art on Wednesday, 5 November 2014 with a $25-35 million estimate.]]>
August 10, 2014, source: Christie’s
This masterwork comes completely fresh to the market, having remained in the same collection for over a century and been on loan for the last two decades at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. The proceeds from the sale of ‘Le Printemps’ will benefit a private American foundation supporting environmental, public health and other charitable causes.
From the mid-1860s, Manet had established his reputation as the leading master of portraiture among the practitioners of “New Painting,” radically transforming its scope to embrace a dialogue between the traditional canon of art history and contemporary Belle Époque Paris. Actress Jeanne Demarsy is cast as an allegory of spring, a theme artists embraced since antiquity, yet executed in the artist’s ground-breaking painterly style and in a vanguard setting.
With an eye to Goya and early Renaissance portraits of young noblewomen, Manet posed Jeanne in profile. He evoked the arrival of spring in his treatment of Jeanne’s specially designed flowered dress, her lacy parasol, her bonnet regaled with blossoms, and the profuse verdant foliage of rhododendrons he painted behind her. Of the four seasons, Manet completed only ‘Le Printemps’ and ‘L’Automne’, Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nancy.
Brooke Lampley, Head of Impressionist and Modern Art comments, “On the heels of the fantastic traveling exhibition Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity, of which works by Manet were a keystone, we are delighted to have been entrusted with the sale of Le Printemps. This painting is by the first artist of the modern era, encapsulating all major themes of the early modern period, from nature and femininity to society and fashion. One of his best known and most widely reproduced works, Le Printemps exemplifies the revolutionary style that Manet embraced.”
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Recently acquired painting by Manet goes on display at the Getty (news, 2011)
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