AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883) is celebrated as an accomplished painter and draughtsman, equally conversant with canvas, oil paint and brush as he was pen and ink. From the perspective of materiality, his pastels, particularly those executed on primed canvases, stand at the intersection of these two disciplines. Relying on analysis carried out for an ambitious online scholarly catalogue, this talk compares and contrasts two of these works, Man with a Dog and Portrait of Alphonse Maureau, and discusses the adoption of paintings conservation techniques to stabilize the artworks for storage and display. Both works are portraits in the collection of the Prints and Drawings Department at the Art Institute of Chicago. Although dissimilar as portraits, the works are strikingly similar in terms of materials and techniques. Examination of the works indicates that Manet borrowed heavily from his knowledge of painting practice. Notable technical analysis included thread count and weave match analysis, which demonstrate that the supports were cut from the same bolt of cloth, likely a commercially prepared canvas. Unfortunately, the canvases are significantly undulated and the ground does not provide adequate purchase for the layers of unfixed pastel, and thus there is media loss throughout both artworks. The second part of this lecture details how paper conservation staff have used padded inserts, similar to those used for oil paintings, to fill the recesses created by the stretcher from the verso to provide an even support and cushioning to the slack canvases, and to reduce or eliminate vibration. The Édouard Manet online scholarly catalogue is available through the Art Institute of Chicago’s Conservation web page or through the following address: https://publications.artic.edu/manet/reader/manetart/section/140020.