View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle

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View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle: Edouard Manet

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Edouard Manet Oil Painting - View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle

Keywords: View, Exposition, Universelle

Work Overview: View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle
L'Exposition universelle
Edouard Manet
Date: 1867; Paris, France *
Style: Realism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil, canvas
108 x 196 x 2,5 cm
Location: Nasjonalmuseet, The Fine Art Collections, Oslo, Norway

The 1850s onwards witnessed an explosive growth in the number of so-called World’s Expositions (or World’s Fairs), and in 1867 France held the largest one yet. The exposition occupied the entire Champ de Mars in Paris, to where spectators thronged from the whole world. Édouard Manet was excluded from the exposition’s official art programme, and he therefore erected his own exhibition pavilion on a height on the right bank of the Seine, adjacent to Trocadero, from where one had a magnificent view of the exposition grounds.

Manet’s main interest in this painting, however, was not the world’s exposition itself, and it serves more as a backdrop for the scattered figures and groups of the foreground; among these figures we can identify Leon Koella Leenhoff, the son of Mme Manet, as the young boy walking a dog. Rather than presenting a unifying or overarching narrative, the painting illustrates the pulsating, fragmentary diversity of modern life in the city. Manet presumably used a number of individual studies when executing the painting, though any such studies seem to be lost now.

Manet chose to abandon the painting while it was still a sketch, as a more urgent event demanded his attention: the execution of the French-backed Emperor Maximilian in Mexico in June 1867. The painting was sold for a relatively modest sum (as it was unfinished) at the auction following Manet’s death. For a while it was owned by the prominent Manet collector Auguste Pellerin, before becoming available again on the Parisian market during the First World War, when it was acquired by the Norwegian shipowner Tryggve Sagen. The picture was subsequently purchased by the Friends of the National Gallery.

Edouard Manet's (1832-1883) view of the Universal Exposition is essentially an unfinished study of this great world event which took place in Paris in 1867. Presented as a panoramic view, taken from the heights of the Trocadéro, the artist's rendition is somewhat compressed and contrived with spatial disjunctions, omissions, mixtures of scales and of perspective. Nevertheless, it is not so dissimilar to surviving prints, drawings and photographs from the period and parts of its Parisian skyline can still be recognised today.

The painting was never exhibited during Manet's lifetime and the earliest surviving reference to it dates from an inventory carried out after his death in 1883. Having first passed through the hands of several private owners, the painting was then acquired as a donation from the Friends of the National Gallery in 1923. Due to its gradually deteriorating condition the painting was taken down for analysis in the autumn of 2010 and then cleaned and conserved and re-hung in December 2011. Parts of the investigations and conservation treatments were filmed and the report and selected findings are presented below.

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Edouard Manet

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