In the Conservatory

A fashionable couple sits among the greenery of a Paris conservatory, their hands almost touching, their thoughts somewhere else entirely.

The story behind the painting

In 1878 and 1879 Édouard Manet used a conservatory at 70 Rue d'Amsterdam in Paris as his studio for nine months; it then belonged to the painter Georg von Rosen. There he painted In the Conservatory, a double portrait of his friends the Guillemets, a married couple who owned a clothing shop. A Parisian conservatory could be more than a greenhouse: a painting of the period presented it as a luxurious, intimate place suited to private meetings. Manet showed the canvas at the Paris Salon of 1879, where it seemed surprisingly conservative for him. The critic Castagnary joked that the face and hands were drawn more carefully than usual and asked whether Manet was making concessions to the public.

What to look for

Madame Guillemet sits upright on a bench in the foreground, colourfully dressed, the clear focus of the picture. Behind the bench, her husband Jules leans forward in dark clothes. Their rings show they are married, and the nearness of their hands is the only hint of intimacy. Neither looks at the other or at us. Lines shape the whole composition: the woman's straight posture echoes the vertical slats of the bench, the man leans without breaking that vertical, and the bench runs off the right edge, separating foreground from background. Only the diagonal pleats of her dress soften the order, set against the surrounding green.

Meaning and intent

The painting's quiet ambiguity has made critics disagree for more than a century. Their separation, their lack of contact with the viewer and their distant gazes create a sense of detachment that modern critics see as its main theme. Huysmans found the pair marvellously detached from the green around them and called Madame Guillemet a lively flirt, while another critic called her sulky. John Richardson found the figures stiff; Castagnary thought nothing could be more natural. George Heard Hamilton sensed a strange tension, and a feminist critic later saw in her independence a radical image of women. Manet leaves the question open.

Legacy

Jean-Baptiste Faure bought the painting from Manet with three others. In 1896 the Nationalgalerie in Berlin purchased it, becoming the first museum anywhere to buy a Manet. At the end of the Second World War it was evacuated with other works from Berlin's museums to a mine in Merkers, where the Monuments Men found and secured it. Photographs of American soldiers posing with it in the mine became famous, and are often wrongly used to illustrate Nazi looted art. Today it hangs in the Alte Nationalgalerie, with Chez le Père Lathuille, painted later that year, often seen as its companion.