Manet, Édouard (1832-1883)
Le Déjeuner dans l’atelier (Luncheon in the Studio)
1868
Oil on canvas, 118.3 x 154 cm
Neue Pinakothek, Munich
The title of the painting, “Le déjeuner dans l’atelier”, distracts from the fact that this is a portrait of Léon Koëlla Leenhoff, the then sixteen-year-old illegitimate son of the Dutch pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, whom Manet had married in 1863. He was probably Léon‘s father himself. He portrayed him several times. Léon is the main character: close, given entirely from the front and almost over the full height. The other two people, like everything else, are subordinate to and subordinate to him. The servant, the smoker, the arm’s still life on the chair, the plant in the colorful pot and the table set, but also the French window and the map in the background – everything is composed for the young man, highlights him and yet at the same time distracts from him. The emphatic way in which he is brought into the picture is softened by the incidental, and so Léon does not stand in the middle and is not given in the whole figure. Nor does he look at the viewer, but looks past us closedly, a little blasé, a little melancholy. With this portrait, Manet has given the modern type of the dandy, whose self-image plays between superiority and loneliness. As fashionably dressed as he is, as much as he embodies the elegant young Parisian, he stands on the other hand in a far-reaching tradition, which Manet virtually quotes, because the weapons and helmet on the left as well as the Dutch still life on the table are reminiscent of the time two hundred years ago. At the same time, this gives an indication of the tradition in which Manet saw himself. Other of his works confirm that Rubens, Velazquez, Frans Hals and the Dutch still life painters were among the artists whose works guided him or who were imparted to him by painters of the more recent tradition, such as Goya and Delacroix. (Neue Pinakothek)
See also:
• Koelin-Leenhoff, Léon (1852-1927)