Édouard Manet y su mujer

Édouard Manet slumps on a sofa, listening to his wife play the piano. But where her face should be, the canvas is cut away. Manet himself took a knife to the gift his friend had made him.

The story behind the painting

Degas painted this double portrait in 1868 to 1869. It shows his fellow painter Édouard Manet sprawled on a sofa while he listens to his wife Suzanne playing the piano. Degas gave the picture to the couple as a present. Manet, however, did not like the way his wife was shown, and he cut the canvas so that it no longer contained her face or her instrument. Degas took the damaged work back, and it was found in his studio when he died.

What to look for

The canvas is almost square, about 65 by 71 cm. On the left, Manet lounges on the sofa, relaxed and absorbed in the music. On the right, the figure of Suzanne at the keyboard breaks off where Manet's knife went through. Later the painting was partly restored by adding a strip of raw canvas in place of the missing part of the composition. Look at that blank band: it is a scar that tells the story of a quarrel between two friends.

Meaning and intent

The picture was meant as a friendly, intimate portrait of a couple at home, music filling the room. The cut turns it into something else: a record of how differently two painters could see the same person. The source does not say what exactly Manet disliked, only that the representation of Suzanne did not suit him. What remains is half a scene, the listening husband intact and the playing wife reduced to an edge, with the bare canvas standing in for what was lost.

Legacy

The collector Matsukata Kōjirō acquired the painting between the two world wars. After his bankruptcy in 1927 it was among 400 works of his collection stored at the Musée Rodin. In November 1944 the French state seized the collection as enemy property, and it officially entered French national collections with the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951. In 1959 France returned most of these works, including this one, to Japan to improve relations. Since 1974 it has been kept at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art.