Surprised Nymph

Surprised Nymph: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - Surprised Nymph

Keywords: Surprised, Nymph

Work Overview: La Nymphe surprise (Nymph Surprised)
La Nymphe surprise
Artist Édouard Manet
Year 1861
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 122 cm × 144 cm (48 in × 57 in)
Location National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires

La Nymphe surprise, or Nymph Surprised, is a painting by the French impressionist painter Édouard Manet, created in 1861. The model was Suzanne, a pianist and his secret beloved for years, whom he married two years later. The painting is a key work in Manet's production, marking the beginning of a new period in his artistic career and generally in the history of modernism in French painting. It is in National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires[1] and it is considered as one of the collection's highlights. Manet had special feelings for this painting, and La Nymphe surprise remained in the artist's possession his entire life, and there is evidence that points to the fact that, apart from the emotional significance it represented for the artist, Manet considered this painting as one of his most important works.

The model of the painting is Édouard Manet's lover, who also was his piano teacher, the Dutch girl Suzanne Leenhoff, with whom he had a secret love affair. This love affair developed while the young Manet was still living in his parents' house. The girl was three years older than the 17-year-old Manet and their relationship was kept secret from his family for a long time. Manet and Suzanne married after ten years of love relationship in 1863,[5] two years after the completion of this painting in 1861.[1] The relationship lasted throughout their lives.[5][6]

Nymphs were female spirits of nature, female deities from Greek mythology, often depicted as young women, who dwell in mountains and small woods, by springs and rivers.[7] Several authors think that the motif is similar to Rembrandt's Susanna and the Elders, considering that the model's name is Suzanne, she was Dutch and the figure's pose is identical with the one in the painting. Manet kept this painting in his atelier. The painting was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français in 1865.[2] This painting was painted two years before the Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) and Olympia.[8] The painting was purchased by the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and was placed on display at the Museum, as one of the institution's highlights.

Manet's La Nymphe surprise depicts a young woman sitting in a wooded landscape beside a lake, looking surprised at the viewer. There is a blue iris growing at her feet, and she wears nothing on her body except the white pearls around her neck and a ring on her little finger. The nymph's glance, contrary to Olympia's provocative glance, is surprised and shy, as if she has found the viewer watching her, invading her privacy, disturbing her.

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Along with the Dejeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia, The Surprised Nymph is one of Manet's major treatments of the quintessential subject-matter of academic practice: the female nude. Like the two slightly later paintings, this is a large work and one which clearly took Manet some time to produce.

It is believed that the model for the painting was Suzanne Leen-hoff, Manet's future wife. In part, the work may be a pun on her name, for her pose is reminiscent of that of conventional depictions of Susannah disturbed by the elders, at once provocative and chaste. Around the time he produced this work, Manet moved into a new apartment on the rue de l'Hotel de Ville with Suzanne and Leon and the ambivalent attitude of the nude woman may suggest the artist's response to his future wife who in later paintings is shown as an upright member of the bourgeoisie. She is perhaps best understood in contrast to the nude woman in the Dejeuner for whom she represents both a prototype and a transformation. Whereas The Surprised Nymph depicts a naked bourgeois woman who shields her body from the gaze of the voyeuristic onlooker, she is presented in the Dejeuner as a professional working model apparently flaunts her body and subverts the traditional roles of the spectator and the nude.

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