The Balcony (painting)
| The Balcony | |
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| Artist | Édouard Manet |
| Year | 1868 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 170 cm × 124 cm (67 in × 49 in) |
| Location | Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
The Balcony (French: Le balcon) is an 1868-69 oil painting by the French painter Édouard Manet. The painting depicts four figures on a balcony, one sitting and the others standing. Seated on the left is the painter Berthe Morisot, who became the wife of Manet's brother, Eugène in 1874. In the centre is the painter Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet. On the right is Fanny Claus, a violinist. The fourth figure, partially obscured in the interior's background, is possibly Léon Leenhoff, Manet's son. It was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1869, and then kept by Manet until his death in 1883. It was sold to the painter Gustave Caillebotte in 1884, who left it to the French state in 1894. It is currently held at the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris.
The painting, inspired by Majas on the Balcony by Francisco Goya, was created at the same time and with the same purpose as Luncheon in the Studio.
The three characters, who were all friends of Manet, seem to be disconnected from each other: while Berthe Morisot, on the left, looks like a romantic and inaccessible heroine, the young violinist Fanny Claus and the painter Antoine Guillemet seem to display indifference. The boy in the background is probably Manet's son, Léon. Just behind the railings, there are a hydrangea in a ceramic pot, and a dog with a ball below Morisot's chair.
This was the first portrait of Morisot by Manet. Manet adopts a retrained colour palette, dominated by white, green and black, with a accents of blue (Guillemet's tie) and red (Morisot's fan).
Manet made many preparatory studies, painting the four subjects individually many times: Guillemet as many as fifteen times. A preparatory study for The Balcony was painted at Boulogne in 1868. This unfinished portrait of Fanny Claus, the closest friend of Manet’s wife Suzanne Leenhoff; Claus married Manet's friend Pierre Prins in 1869. The work was bought after Manet's death in a studio sale by John Singer Sargent. The portrait had only been seen once in public since it was first painted in 1868, but in 2012 the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford succeeded in raising the funds to acquire it and keep it permanently in a public collection in the United Kingdom.
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