Manet chalk drawing of child rediscovered in Italian collection — SkimNews
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- Emily Beeny, chief curator at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, attributed a red chalk drawing of a crouching child to Édouard Manet after colleague Francesco Baccanelli spotted it in "a small and little-known collection" in northern Italy.
- The 20.5cm by 17.5cm drawing shows abrupt light-to-shadow transitions and "peculiar plump, tapered fingers" that Beeny called stylistic tics characteristic of Manet, with UV analysis revealing his faded studio stamp in the lower right corner.
- The crouching child resembles a figure in Manet's The Old Musician and may be the same person who posed as the little girl at left in the finished painting — possibly Alexandre, a youth who cleaned Manet's brushes in the late 1850s, though the drawing appears to depict a girl around age six.
- Although the drawing was squared for transfer to canvas, no known Manet composition corresponds to it; Beeny said it may be "the first unpublished drawing by Manet to be discovered in many years."
- Beeny and Baccanelli will publish their findings in the October issue of the Burlington Magazine, and Beeny said she hopes the Wildenstein Plattner Institute will include the drawing in the next edition of the Manet catalogue raisonné.
- Research shows the drawing was sold twice in the 1930s — first in Germany, then Switzerland — but never appeared in any scholarly publications on the artist, with the academics writing that "the drawing's original purpose remains as mysterious as its early history."
Why it matters: A drawing that slipped past every Manet scholar despite being sold twice in the 1930s could now enter the Wildenstein Plattner Institute's definitive catalogue raisonné, expanding the documented scope of Manet's 1850s–1860s Florentine-influenced draughtsmanship. The October Burlington Magazine publication subjects the attribution to formal peer review, and its UV-confirmed studio stamp gives it evidentiary standing beyond stylistic argument.
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