Music in the Tuileries

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Music in the Tuileries: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - Music in the Tuileries

Keywords: Music, Tuileries

Work Overview: Music in the Tuileries
Música en las Tullerías
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1862
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 76 cm × 118 cm (30 in × 46 in)
Location The Hugh Lane, Dublin

Music in the Tuileries is an 1862 painting by Édouard Manet. It is jointly owned by the National Gallery, London and The Hugh Lane, Dublin. It currently hangs in the National Gallery in London.

The work is an early example of Manet's painterly style, inspired by Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez, and it is a harbinger of his lifelong interest in the subject of leisure. The painting influenced Manet's contemporaries – such as Monet, Renoir and Bazille – to paint similar large groups of people.

The painting depicts the gatherings of Parisians at weekly concerts in the Tuileries gardens near the Louvre, although no musicians are depicted. While the picture was regarded as unfinished by some,[2] the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time; one may imagine the music and conversation.

The iron chairs in the foreground had just replaced the wooden chairs in the garden in 1862. Manet has included several of his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and a self-portrait. Manet is depicted on the far left; next to him is another painter Albert de Balleroy. To their right, seated, is sculptor and critic Zacharie Astruc. Manet's brother Eugène Manet is in foreground, right of centre, with white trousers; the composer Jacques Offenbach with glasses and moustache sits against a tree to the right; critic Théophile Gautier stands against a tree in brown suit and full beard, while author Charles Baudelaire is to the left of Gautier. Henri Fantin-Latour is further left, with beard, looking at the viewer.[3] The fair-haired child in the centre is Léon Leenhoff.

The work measures 76.2 × 118.1 centimetres (30.0 × 46.5 in). It was first exhibited in 1863, and Manet sold the painting to opera singer and collector Jean-Baptiste Faure in 1883. It was sold on to dealer Durand-Ruel in 1898, and then to collector Sir Hugh Lane in 1903. After Lane's death, when RMS Lusitania was sunk in 1915, an unwitnessed codicil to his will left the painting to the Dublin City Gallery (now known as The Hugh Lane). The codicil was found to be invalid, and in 1917 a court case decided that his previous will left the work to the National Gallery in London. After intervention from the Irish government, the two galleries reached a compromise in 1959, agreeing to share the paintings, with half of the Lane Bequest lent and shown in Dublin every five years. The agreement was varied in 1993 so that 31 of the 39 paintings would stay in Ireland, and four of the remaining eight would be lent to Dublin for 6 years at a time.

The colors in greater areas of this painting are generally subdued and executed in ochres or in mixtures of several pigments. The dark green foliage in the upper part contains a glaze of emerald green and Scheele's green mixed with yellow lake with small addition of ivory black and yellow ochre. The strong colourful accents in the bonets and clothes of the children are painted in almost pure pigments such as cobalt blue, vermilion or chrome orange.

This painting of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris was Manet's first major work depicting modern city life. The band is playing and a fashionable crowd has gathered to listen.

The picture includes portraits of Manet's friends and family. These include Manet himself as well as:
Baudelaire - poet (1821 - 1867)
Théophile Gautier - poet and novelist (1811 - 1872)
Ignace Fantin-Latour - flower-painter (1836 - 1904)
Jacques Offenbach (1819 - 1880) - composer
Eugène - the artist's brother (1833 - 1892)

The writer Emile Zola described Manet as “an analytic painter” and rarely are his powers of analysis displayed more dazzlingly than in Music in the Tuileries Gardens.
First exhibited in 1862 at Manet’s one-man show in the Galerie Martinet, the chorus of gibes it was met with was to set the tone for the later drubbings he received for those larger Salon submissions, Déjeuner sur l’Herbe in 1863 and Olympia in 1865 (the Salon was the official art exhibition).
For the modern viewer, perhaps, it is difficult to see at first what all the fuss was about. The painting, a medium-sized group portrait. It depicts a crowd of music-lovers in the Tuileries Gardens and might seem to us quaint—old-fashioned even, evoking a fine day spent near the Louvre where concerts were performed twice weekly, and attracted the fashionable elite of the Second Empire.

At that time, with the imperial palace of the Tuileries still intact, society people would flock to the gardens to see and to be seen. A military band would be playing and people would meet there to talk, among them Manet himself, who often went there with his new friend the poet Charles Baudelaire.

Parts of Music in the Tuileries Garden are sketchily painted or indeed left unfinished. The crowd of people is only partly resolved into isolated groups engaged in conversation. People of the art scene would recognise some of those portrayed in the picture: Manet himself, Manet's brother Eugčne, the composer Jacques Offenbach, Charles Baudelaire and Théodore Gautier.

In its compositional approach this painting opened up one of the various routes subsequently to be followed by the Impressionists.

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