 Hi, and welcome to the Barnes Takeout. My name is Kendra Kiris. I'm a member of the art team and I'm instructor of adult education here at the Barnes Foundation. Today, we're going to look at French artist Edouard Manet's Laundry or Le Lange and it hangs here in gallery two on the west wall. It was painted in 1875 and it is flanked here by two plein air paintings by Paul Cézanne. And Laundry is also a plein air painting which is surprising considering its large format. It was completed in the Parisian garden of Manet's colleague, Alphonse Isch and we know that the models are Alice Le Gouvet and also the daughter of Le Gouvet. So let's take a look closer look. We see here a contemporary scene of a young woman in a garden dressed in blue. She's washing linens accompanied by her child. Some of the linens already hang on the line and the child is fascinated by this cascade of water coming from the hands of the mother and the two are neatly framed by the foliage of this town garden and the activity is washing. It's generally a strenuous activity. However, here we have no tension at all. It's a peaceful moment, a simple moment that is very much about the present. And if we look at the colors we see vivid greens, bright blue and Manet's trademark black is really nowhere to be found except for that ribbon on the woman's bonnet. And the way that Manet builds up the color can take a closer look at these greens. He really places colors, different hues side by side rather than gradually building up layers and blending pigments and glazes in the academic style. And so we have essentially patches of color side by side. And Manet was known as a painter of modern life. This grew out of conversations with poet Charles Baudelaire who wrote an essay of that title, Pantry de la vie moderne. And rather than depicting subjects of the past, biblical, classical, literary subjects, historical subjects, the painter of modern life according to Baudelaire focused on the present, the urban life he saw around him or her. And we see that here, laundry is very much in some ways a departure for Manet from the previous decade where he made a name for himself presenting controversial polemic paintings such as Luncheon on the Grass or Olympia. Here we have really no confrontation, no sense of irony. We have a very, as I said, kind of simple scene. And if we take a look at kind of the space of the painting, we do have this kind of closed space. We don't see the sky. We don't see the sun or horizon. We really are deep in the city and deep in this Parisian garden. And there is a real stability to this composition that comes especially from this monumental figure of the mother. However, the picture is not static. It is very dynamic. And some of that dynamism comes from really the application of paint and the way that the touches of paint seem to kind of dissolve into the atmosphere, this atmosphere of this light-filled garden. And this pair is really subsumed by light. We could even say that the subject of this painting is indeed light. And the year this picture was shown, poet Stefan Malame, close friend and colleague of Manet, wrote an essay called The Impressionists and Edouard Manet. And there in the essay of Malame talks about this painting in the barns. And he also hails Manet as the leader of the Impressionists. And this is a sort of problematic statement because Manet was not a member of the Impressionist group. And he also never exhibited with the group and certainly rejected that title. However, we could also say not only that perhaps Manet was the leader of the Impressionists, but we could say that Manet learned from the Impressionists. He spent a lot of time in the mid-1870s around the time this painting was completed with the Impressionists like Bert Morezo, like Claude Monet. He spent time in Argentina painting out of doors. And truly, he is one of the least classifiable artists of the 19th century. Manet has been called the last of the old masters. He's been called a realist, the first of the modernists, and as we mentioned, the leader of the Impressionists. And I think because Manet resisted these kinds of art discussions and stayed out of the debates for the most part, wrote very little about his art, means that we have all these kind of conflicting reports. But I'll leave you with this last thought, and that is that Malome, who visited Manet's studio pretty regularly, reported that one of Manet's philosophies was that one should never paint two figures or two landscapes with the same process, never with the same knowledge, never in the same fashion. And I think what we can draw from that is this idea that Manet saw each painting as a new experiment and that he didn't allow himself to be bound to one school of art or one way of working. And so he maintained a kind of newness of vision. And I'll leave you with that. And that wraps up our takeout today, but if you are interested in further exploring Manet, we have a course beginning May 4th called Manet in Modern Paris. Check that out, that will be happening online. And of course, subscribe to our channel and leave comments below. We love hearing from you. Thank you and see you next time. I'm Tom Collins, new Bauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. 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