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It was first Manet and then the Impressionists who followed the path opened up by Courbet in the pictorial representation of reality, even going beyond him to begin a new investigation based on the perception of the instantaneous. For his part, Manet was the first to depict the everyday experiences of big city life, convinced, as was Baudelaire, that "the true painter is he who knows how to grasp the epic in daily life."
The Woman in a Riding Habit, Fullface belongs to an unfinished series on the subject of the Four Seasons which Manet painted in the last two years of his life as a commission from his friend Antonin Proust, the Minister of Fine Arts. The theme of the Four Seasons, represented by female figures, was a comparatively common subject in western art. Manet's sister-in-law, Berthe Morisot, had painted one such cycle with young women in fashionable contemporary dress. In addition, Japanese prints, which were in widespread circulation at this date, also commonly represented the seasons as courtesans.
Manet was already very ill when he started this series and only completely finished the first painting, Spring, for which he used as a model the famous actress from the Comédie Française, Jeanne Demarsy. Manet showed the painting with great success at the 1882 Salon next to his late masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. For Autumn, which remained unfinished, he used Méry Laurent as his model. She had arrived in Paris at the age of seventeen to make her debut as an actress and soon became famous, establishing links with the city's artistic and literary circles. Marcel Proust based his character of Odette Swann in A la recherche du temps perdus on Laurent.
For Woman in a Riding Habit, which was possibly intended to represent summer, a less familiar young woman posed as the model. She was Henriette Chabot, daughter of a book-seller in the rue de Moscou. Encouraged by the success of Spring in the previous Salon, Manet made particular efforts with this canvas with the intention of showing it at the 1883 Salon. He painted three versions (Jamot-Wildenstein, nos. 482-484): a Woman in a Riding Habit in profile of the same format but very unfinished (Kunstmuseum, Basel), and another Woman in a Riding Habit, Fullface (Villa Flora, Winterthur), as well as the present version. Of the three, only the Thyssen-Bornemisza painting was chosen for the posthumous exhibition devoted to Manet in 1884 in the École des Beaux-Arts, where it was hung for the first time next to the paintings of Spring and Autumn.
Manet paid great attention to his sitters? dress, following Baudelaire's belief that fashion was the key to modernity: if Jeanne Demarsy was dressed in a floral dress of the latest style with her attractive snub-nose outlined against a flowery background, Méry Laurent wore a modern, brown-coloured pelisse ordered by Manet from the famous couturier Worth. In the present painting the young Chabot wears a riding habit which, according to Antonin Proust, Manet had borrowed from his friend and fellow-painter Gallard d'Épinay.
The colour of the habit allowed Manet to demonstrate his magical control of blacks which, contrasting with the lightness of the background, recalls works by Frans Hals. The treatment of the light is Impressionist, although in Manet the search for luminosity is juxtaposed with the study of the surfaces of colour, the contours and the textures. The fact that the painting is incomplete allows a clear perception of the freedom with which it is painted, with that mastery and lack of hesitation which, with minimal but sure strokes, Manet captured and conveyed the essential.
Paloma Alarcó
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