Édouard Manet - Portrait of Clemenceau at the tribune 1880
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Portrait of Clemenceau at the tribune 1880
115x88cm oil/canvas
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, USA
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From Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth:
Shortly after he became prime minister of France in 1906, Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) ordered Manet’s controversial painting of Olympia to be transferred from the Musée du Luxembourg (where contemporary art was relegated) to the Louvre, thus granting it old master status. When the two men first met is unknown, but Clemenceau, just out of medical school, left for America as a newspaper correspondent in 1865, the year in which Manet first exhibited Olympia in Paris. Following his return in 1869, Clemenceau entered the tumultuous French political world as a radical leftist. Manet, who often asked his friends to model for him as themselves, seems to have developed a particular interest in political figures as subjects around 1879, which is when he initiated this painting of Clemenceau, one of two different versions of identical size. The rostrum at the bottom of the Kimbell painting was probably intended as an economical way to indicate Clemenceau’s incumbency at the time in the Chamber of Deputies.