Music in the Tuileries
Music in the Tuileries Gardens is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet. The 1.18 × 0.76 meter picture was taken 1862. The painting is owned jointly by the National Gallery in London and Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and is alternately displayed in both museums.
Background
That was the criticism for the exhibition of the picture in 1862 at the Galerie Martinet in the Boulevard des Italiens. The audience was completely overwhelmed with this new and very unconventional painting technique. The writer Émile Zola even remembered a visitor who had threatened violence, should not disappear from the issuance of this eyesore. Zola writes:
" Imagine under the trees of the Tuileries a lot, maybe a hundred people that move in the sun. Each person is a simple, hardly certain blob, in which the details are to lines or black dots. "
Zola recommends the viewer to embark on a " respectful distance " to the image, then he would also be able to see anything. The audience was located but neither respectful distance even of respect at all. The painting remained for 20 years for sale.
The painting
Zola's tip is absolutely right: Only at a certain distance opens up the details of the image. It is a scene from the famous Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, Manet had there spent many summer afternoons and made the first sketches under the curious gaze of the walkers. This painting he completed in his studio, however. The chairs in the foreground of the picture are authentic, all wood garden chairs were in the summer of 1862, namely, to be replaced by just such iron chairs. In addition, Manet has hidden some familiar faces in the picture: friends, acquaintances, critics and opinion makers. Conspicuous the man in the middle is with the white pants, which turns to the left: Manet's brother Eugène It is. Directly behind him against the tree there is a picture of the composer Jacques Offenbach, she looks like a cartoon. Self Manet portrayed standing in the left part of the picture next to his former comrades studio, the painter Albert de Balleroy. If we change our view of the two painters slightly to the right, more faces are recognizable: The seated person is the journalist Zacharie Astruc, standing behind him, the man with the mustache his colleague Aurélien Scholl. In the somewhat more right-wing man who seems to look at the viewer, is the painter Henri Fantin -Latour. Far less clear, but identified by connoisseurs, is the group of people that is located directly over the yellow -robed women: It is to concern the museum officials Baron Tylor, Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire.