A red chalk drawing of a crouching child, spotted in a private Italian collection, has been attributed by an art historian to the French modernist painter Édouard Manet. The child, whose identity has yet to be established, resembles a street urchin in the Manet masterpiece The Old Musician, in which he sought to show the humanity of homeless and marginalised people. The art historian Emily Beeny, a specialist in French paintings and drawings of the 17th to 19th centuries, said she sensed the drawing’s potential as soon as she received a photograph from a colleague, Francesco Baccanelli, who had noticed the drawing in the Italian collection.
I’m not sure when the last unpublished drawing by Manet was discovered, but it has definitely been many years.” It is characteristic of red chalk life studies that Manet made in the 1850s and 1860s, influenced by his close study of Renaissance draughtsmanship in Florence. Similar sketches relate to masterpieces such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, as well as The Old Musician. Beeny is chief curator of the Legion of Honor at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and her exhibitions have included Manet and Modern Beauty, staged by the Museum in Los Angeles and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Art historians often disagreed on attributions, but this drawing was also correct stylistically, she said, pointing to “the abrupt transitions between light and shadow, and the peculiar plump, tapered fingers – little figural tics that are very characteristic of Manet”. Crucially, UV analysis has revealed Manet’s faded studio stamp in the lower right-hand corner. The drawing measures 20.5cm by 17.5cm and although it is squared for transfer to a canvas, no such composition by the artist is known.
Baccanelli specialises in 17th- and 18th-century paintings and prints, mostly from Lombardy and Veneto. On a visit to “a small and little-known collection” in northern Italy, he said, the owner pointed out an inscription on the reverse of the mount identifying the drawing as a work by Manet, but that no art historian had ever studied it. He said: “I was completely captivated by it … The more I studied it, the more convinced I became that it was indeed a work by Manet … I contacted Emily Beeny, one of the world’s leading experts on Manet.” Beeny and Baccanelli will publish their findings in the October issue of the scholarly journal the Burlington Magazine.
Speculating on the figure’s identity, they refer to Alexandre, a youth hired by Manet in the late 1850s to clean his brushes and palettes, who occasionally posed for him. Although this drawing may depict him, they say, it seems to show a little girl, perhaps aged around six. Beeny said: “It’s quite possible that she’s the same person who posed for a little girl, with a very similar hairstyle, who stands at left in the finished version of The Old Musician.
It’s clearly a drawing with which he took some time and effort, and with which he was pleased, considering that he squared it for transfer.” She said she hoped it would be included in the next edition of the definitive Manet catalogue raisonné, produced by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which has yet to study the drawing. Research has revealed that the drawing was sold twice in the 1930s, in Germany and then in Switzerland, although it did not make it into any scholarly publications on the artist. The academics write in the Burlington: “For now, the drawing’s original purpose remains as mysterious as its early history.”
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