Manet's Madame Manet at the Piano (1868): Suzanne Leenhoff at Home
Édouard Manet painted his wife at the piano in 1868, in the family apartment in Paris. The canvas is small, about thirty-eight by forty-six centimetres, and almost bare. Suzanne Manet sits in profile at the keyboard, dressed in dark clothes, her hands on the keys. Behind her is a pale panelled wall and the edge of a mirror. There is no audience, no sheet music turned toward the viewer, no story. A woman is playing in her own sitting room, and the painter is listening.
It is one of the plainest pictures Manet ever made, and one of the most personal. To read it, you need to know who the woman at the piano was, and what happened to another painting of her the same year.
Who Suzanne Manet was
Suzanne Leenhoff was born in 1829 in Delft, in the Netherlands, the daughter of a church organist. She came to Paris as a young pianist, and around 1849 she was engaged to give piano lessons to the sons of Auguste Manet, a senior judge. Édouard, the eldest, was about seventeen.
In 1852 Suzanne gave birth to a son, Léon. He was registered under another surname and grew up presented as her younger brother. Whether his father was Édouard or Auguste Manet has never been settled.
Édouard and Suzanne lived together quietly for more than ten years. Auguste Manet died in September 1862. In October 1863 the couple married in Zaltbommel, the Dutch town where her family lived. Léon later posed for several of Manet's paintings, among them The Luncheon in the Studio, painted in 1868, the same year as this portrait of his mother.
A pianist, not a sitter
Suzanne was a serious musician, and music was part of the evenings the Manets held at home for painters, writers and composers. Charles Baudelaire, one of Manet's closest friends, admired her playing. In his last illness, in 1866 and 1867, when he could barely speak, she was among the friends who came to his clinic to play Wagner for him.
Manet's picture takes her at her word. The usual formula for a domestic portrait was a wife posed beside an instrument, looking out at the viewer. Manet paints the opposite: a musician at work. Her eyes are on the keys, her back is straight, her attention is turned away from the painter and from us.
The Degas portrait Manet cut
The painting has a companion story. Around 1868 to 1869, Edgar Degas, a friend of both, painted Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet: Manet slouched on a sofa, listening, and Suzanne at the piano. Degas gave the canvas to Manet.
Manet, apparently unhappy with the way his wife's face had been painted, cut away the right-hand part of the picture, where Suzanne sat. When Degas next visited and saw what had been done, he took his painting home and sent back a still life Manet had given him. The cut portrait survives, with a strip of blank canvas attached where Suzanne used to be.
Many historians read Madame Manet at the Piano as Manet's own answer: the same woman at the same instrument, painted the way her husband wanted her seen. Calm, composed, absorbed in the music. The two pictures were made within months of each other, though which came first is not certain.
How the picture is built
The composition is a grid. The wall panels, the frame of the mirror and the side of the piano make a set of upright rectangles. Suzanne's profile, set against the pale wall, is the one soft, curved form among them.
Manet keeps the palette to black, grey, white and the dark wood of the piano, with warm tones only in the face and hands. It is the restricted palette he took from Velázquez and Goya and used through the 1860s, and here it turns an ordinary evening into something formal and still.
The size matters too. At under half a metre wide, this was not a picture for the Salon walls, where Manet fought his public battles over Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. It is a private picture of a private room.
Suzanne in Manet's other paintings
Suzanne appears in Manet's work across nearly twenty years:
The Surprised Nymph (1861), for which she is believed to have been the model.
The Reading (begun around 1865), Suzanne in white beside a window, with Léon reading behind her.
Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa (1874), a pastel.
Madame Manet in the Conservatory (1879).
She is never shown as a beauty on display. She reads, plays, rests. Madame Manet at the Piano is the clearest of these pictures because it gives her the thing she was best at.
Browse Manet and Impressionist prints in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.
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