MASP

Born into an affluent bourgeois family, Manet began life by studying literature and taking up a career as a naval officer. After a trip to Rio de Janeiro aboard a merchant ship, he finally convinced his family to give in to his aspirations to become an artist. Believing that the renovation of painting should be based on the study of tradition, he copied the masterpieces of the Louvre and traveled to Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. A precursor of impressionism, Manet was a key figure in the transition from academic art to modern art. He was a shaker and mover of the artistic scene in the second half of the 19th century in Paris, and an interlocutor of writers and poets such as Émile Zola (1840-1902) and Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). The characters in his paintings stare stiffly at the spectator, seemingly in defiance of tradition and the critics. Mr. Eugène Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter (1881), one of the largest canvases painted by Manet, was recently restored. The kneeling man holding the gun, a personal friend of the artist, was a collector and dealer of art and guns, a lover of the night and of hunting. This work is a parody of the romantic heroes, the antithesis of the fierce fights between men and animals painted by Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). It also satirizes the decorous and artificial gestures of the painting of the salons.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

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The work Mr. Eugène Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter, one of the largest formats executed by Manet, was recently restored with excellent results. Eugène Pertuiset was a well-known collector and merchant of art and arms, besides being a lover of lion hunts and soirées chez Tortoni. Pertuiset was a friend and admirer of Manet and with his portrait now had ten of his works in his collection. The painting was very unfavorably received in the 1881 Salon, not just by the public, but also by some of the artist’s friends, such as the writer and critic Huysmans, who wrote: “As for your Pertuiset, crouched rifle in hand in the room where he surely sees wild animals while behind him is stretched out the yellow model of a lion under the trees, I don’t know what to say. The pose of this hunter, who seems more likely to kill rabbits in the woods of Cucufa, is infantile, and from the point of view of its execution, this canvas is no better than the scrawling of the artists around him. To distinguish himself from them, M. Manet has amused himself by coloring his ground violet; this is a facile and uninteresting novelty.” The discriminating eye and sharp pen of Huysmans were actually unable to identify a masterpiece. For Manet, for whom these words must have been offensive, the work earned him at least a secondary medal, which guaranteed automatic access to the next Salons, to the despair of critics such as Edmond About. Huysmans’s problem was not having perceived the ambiguity of the work, which wavers between a parody of the Romanticism in Delacroix’s lion hunts and a satire of exoticism, of the Bavarian clothing of the boar hunter (as Cachin notes), and Pertuiset’s ridiculous pose, reminiscent of the Tartarin de Tarascon by Afonse Daudet. The insinuation of the ridiculous was not lost on Huysmans, but he perceived it as a fault and not as a subtle effect produced by the artist. Manet could also be satirizing the growing rhetoric of photography, of the long poses required of the model by the incipient technique of photographic “recording”, as mentioned by Camesasca (1987, p. 184). The ethereal background in contrast with the almost material evidence of the trunk in the foreground, appears to augur, as does the blue-violet palette, an imaginary painting of the late Monet de Giverny, a bizarre combination of one of his Weeping Willows with one of his more beautiful Water Lilies. Also, the violet in the background was not “a facile solution”, but a sincere parti pris of a real vision of nature. As reported by Camesasca, the artist had in fact told George Moore that the violet was “the real color of the atmosphere” (“Le plein air est violet”). For Valéry, who places the genial painter in his Triomphe de Manet between “the realism of Zola and the absolute poetry of Mallarmé...” this violet is an option for a realism that has no aspiration other than the purely pictorial.

— Unknown authorship, 1998

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