Le Fifre - Musée De L'Orangerie (after) Edouard Manet, 1932

Artist: Edouard Manet

Medium: Lithographic Poster, 1932

Dimensions: 29.5 x 22 in, 75 x 55.9 cm 

Classic Poster Paper - Excellent Condition A

This 1932 very rare lithographic poster reproduces an amazing painting by Edouard Manet entitled "Le Fifre" (the fifer), from 1866. It was displayed at the Louvre from 1914 until 1947, when it was relocated to the Musée du Jeu de Paume. In 1986, it was moved to its current home in the Musée d'Orsay, the national museum of 19th-century art. (it is now on loan to the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.

On a trip to Spain in 1865, Édouard Manet visited the Prado, where the art of Diego Velasquez was a revelation. Upon his return to Paris, he began work on a new painting, depicting an anonymous regimental fifer of the Spanish army. In this picture, Manet presents the uniformed boy, in a manner that imitates and inverts the formula of Vélazquez's court portraits, against a barely inflected, flattened background of neutral tone, thus frustrating attempts to assess the figure's true size and, by extension, importance.

This is one of the early examples of the craftsmanship of the Mourlot Studio, and its close relationships with countless Museums around the world.