Pearson's Looking Through the Canvas with Henry Sayre on Two Practically Unknown Manet Landscapes and the War that Made Them
Discover two rare Manet landscapes painted during the 1870 Siege of Paris. Listen closely as art historian Henry Sayre explains how war and harsh conditions shaped these unique works.
Henry Sayre, Distinguished Professor of Art History, Oregon State University, Cascades Campus
Join author Henry Sayre in our Looking Through the Canvas webisode series where he will discuss the two (relatively) unknown Manet landscapes and the war that made them.
On December 28, 1870, Édouard Manet crossed Paris (probably on horseback) from his home near the place de Clichy just below Montmartre to the village of Petit-Montrouge at the southern edge of the city. He hadn’t painted for months, ever since France declared war on Prussia in July and when, soon after, he joined the National Guard to defend a Paris that by early September was completely besieged by two German armies. In November he had written his wife—she had left Paris just before the Siege, and his letters were sent out by balloon— that he carried both his paint box and a portable easel in his soldier’s knapsack: “everything I need so as not to waste any time” since he wished, he wrote, “to soon commence several studies after nature.” If there might have been others, the two works he painted that day, The Effect of Snow at Petit-Montrouge and The Gare de Sceaux (the oldest railroad station in Paris) are the only of his paintings that survive the Prussian siege of Paris.
It was freezing cold, with temperatures dropping below zero. The day before, in a heavy snow, the bombardment by Germans of the French forts surrounding Paris had begun, and it intensified on the 28th. The cannonade could be plainly heard in city center, and at the city’s edges, where Manet painted, it was louder. A week later, on January 5, the whole of Petit-Montrouge was bombarded—the first shell burst on the rue Lalande, not two blocks from the Gare de Sceaux. The two paintings, with their rapid, even excited brushwork, exacerbated by both the cold and the cannon fire—the one dominated by browns and umbers, the other blues and grays—must have soon seemed to Manet like harbingers of what was to come. This is their story.
About the speaker
Henry Sayre, Distinguished Professor of Art History, Oregon State University, Cascades Campus
Henry M. Sayre is Distinguished Professor of Art History at Oregon State University, Cascades Campus in Bend, Oregon. He is producer and creator of the 10-part television series A World of Art: Works in Progress, which aired on PBS in the fall of 1997; and author of 7 books, including The Humanities; Writing About Art; The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams; The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970; and an art history book for children, Cave Paintings to Picasso.