Born into an affluent bourgeois family, Manet began his studies with literature and took up a career as a naval officer. After a trip to Rio de Janeiro, he convinced his family that he should 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 Italy, the Netherlands, Austria and Spain. 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 art 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. In The Amazon—Portrait of Marie Lefébure, the background, with its dilute, faded greens, stands in strong contrast to the figure of the woman and the well‑defined volume of her black clothing. The horse is turned toward the background of the canvas, as though about to penetrate it. The amazon is looking outward, while she rides and waves a baton, which looks like it was painted twice—a pentimento (“change of mind” in Italian). In general, artists hide such corrections, but in this case Manet uses it to add a sensation of movement to the composition.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015
The inscription to the right “ed. manet” is not a signature, it was placed by Mme. Manet after the painter’s death, as her express declaration attests: “Certifié d’E. Manet / Mme. Manet.” Two main pentimenti are to be seen, on the whip, previously more raised and in the outline of the model’s back, previously more to the right.
The portrait is of Marie Lefébure, The Amazon – Portrait of Marie Lefébure on Horseback, about whom nothing is known other than the fact that her portrait made a pair with another equestrian portrait of the same size, of painter Émile Guillaumin, possibly her husband. Guillaumin was a landscape painter and should not be confused with his namesake, more famous and also a landscapist, Armand Guillaumin (1841-1927). Émile exhibited in the 1868 Salon, was a habitué of the Café Guerbois, besides frequenting the home of the collector of Japanese engravings, Alphonse Hirsch, also a friend of Monet. The portrait of Émile Guillaumin, hanging in a private collection in Dearborn, Michigan, is dated 1870 and may provide some indications about the canvas in the Masp. According to Duret (1902, n. 123), Guillaumin posed for the equestrian portrait in the garden of Alphonse Hirsch’s home, in rue de Rome, Paris, and was again represented by Manet in the Bal à l’Opéra, in 1873 (New York, Havemeyer Collection). According to Camesasca (1987, p. 64) a date around 1870, the year of Guillaumin’s portrait, would be reasonable, but aspects of style and above all more fragmented brush strokes, lead one to not stray too far from the traditional dating of around 1875-1876 (Jamot, Wildenstein, and Bataille 1967, n. 32) or immediately before that (Rouart and Orienti 1970, n. 214).
The landscape with flying horses in the background in the iconographic tradition of the derbies, underlines, by contrast, the great areas of converging colors, of blacks and deep purples, which unify the first plane without transition and confer to the portrait an abstract character.
— Unknown authorship, 1998
