Woman with a Jug (Suzanne Leenhoff, later Manet)
Edouard Manet
Paris 1832 - Paris 1883
c. 1858-60
Oil on canvas
Manet was one of the modern painting's greatest innovators, yet he was also deeply rooted in the history of art, having studied first-hand the styles and techniques of important masters from all the European schools. The motif of woman pouring water from a jug is an old one, and this early and meditative work recalls the much loved subject of Venus or a woman "at her toilet" (combing her hair or looking in a mirror) by Venetian painters such as Titian and Giorgione, examples of which Manet would have seen at the Louvre. But the artist's radical loose and unfinished treatment of the basin and the hand holding it places the work firmly in the 19th-century avant-garde.
Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen (no. 282 WH)
Woman with a Jug (Suzanne Leenhoff, later Manet)
Edouard Manet
Paris 1832 - Paris 1883
c. 1858-60
Oil on canvas
Manet was one of the modern painting's greatest innovators, yet he was also deeply rooted in the history of art, having studied first-hand the styles and techniques of important masters from all the European schools. The motif of woman pouring water from a jug is an old one, and this early and meditative work recalls the much loved subject of Venus or a woman "at her toilet" (combing her hair or looking in a mirror) by Venetian painters such as Titian and Giorgione, examples of which Manet would have seen at the Louvre. But the artist's radical loose and unfinished treatment of the basin and the hand holding it places the work firmly in the 19th-century avant-garde.
Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen (no. 282 WH)