Works from the 1860s

A woman in a humble interior concentrates on her knitting. Bonvin’s precise handling of chalk and charcoal captures the play of light and shadow on her face and pristine white apron. Emulating seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings, Bonvin produced many such scenes of daily life to great acclaim. 

Silhouetted against the vast, empty landscape, the heroic laborer strides purposefully as he distributes seeds. Tinges of blue and rose in the clouds are repeated in the peasant’s clothing, uniting sky and land through the figure. 

One of eight sheets that formed part of Manet’s first portfolio of prints, this work is based on a drawing probably made from life several years earlier. The subject is the artist’s young assistant and occasional model Alexandre, who committed suicide in his studio in 1859. He is recalled here in a moment of happiness with a dog nearly his size.  

This lithograph is a reinterpretation of one of the artist’s canvases, which he based on paintings by Murillo and Velázquez known through reproductive prints. Manet’s image of a street-smart gamin attests to the artist’s immersion in Spanish art, as well as the productive exchange between painting and prints that informed his work in both media. 

In 1867, Napoleon III of France appointed Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian emperor of Mexico, which was then under French occupation. Realizing the impossibility of ruling through Maximilian, Napoleon gradually withdrew military support, leaving Maximilian unprotected. On June 19, 1867, Maximilian and two of his generals were executed by Mexican nationalists, an event that sparked a storm of controversy in France. Manet dedicated multiple canvases, as well as this lithograph, to the incident. The print was intended for wide circulation but banned from publications by the French government until after the artist’s death.

This study for one of the figures in the ceiling of the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux embodies the academic principles of proportion and finish to which Bouguereau fully subscribed. The figure of Venus accords precisely with the classical ratio of a body exactly seven times the length of its head. 

Along with some notebook sketches and a nearly full-length seated study, this work led to an oil painting (unfinished) now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The inscription “Mme Jules Bertin,” one of the many names under which the subject has been known, was added by a later hand. 

Degas made this drawing in preparation for a painting now in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), in which a jockey falls from his horse during a steeplechase — a challenging event requiring horse and rider to leap over various obstacles. The horse’s tail and the stirrup swing backward as the animal flies through the air.