Édouard Manet, Plum Brandy, c. 1877, oil on canvas (National Gallery of Art)
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”plumbrandy,”]
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] We’re looking at a relatively small Édouard Manet at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It’s called “Plum Brandy” and it’s a really enigmatic little painting. It shows this young woman in this pink outfit sitting at a table with what looks like an unlit cigarette in her hand and a little glass of plum brandy.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:24] Of brandy with a plum in it. What’s so characteristic of Manet here, and also of Degas, and what other Impressionists did, is the way that she looks outside of the canvas and how enigmatic her look is, how we can’t read what she’s thinking about.
[0:38] She looks away. We don’t know what she’s looking at. We don’t know what our relationship is to her. But there’s something so modern and so powerful about her. She must be a working-class woman, I would presume.
Dr. Zucker: [0:51] No question. We know that from her clothing and also the fact…
Dr. Harris: [0:54] The cigarette. She’s alone in a bar.
Dr. Zucker: [0:55] It was not okay for her to have the cigarette, nor to be alone in the bar.
Dr. Harris: [0:58] Probably a middle-class, upper-middle-class woman would have had gloves on her hands.
Dr. Zucker: [1:04] Absolutely. She’s waiting. In a sense, waiting for us to look at her. Manet has set this up so we become the person who interacts.
Dr. Harris: [1:11] Which he does so often, doesn’t he? In “Olympia”…
Dr. Zucker: [1:12] He really does, but he has separated us from her by the table.
Dr. Harris: [1:16] With the table.
Dr. Zucker: [1:17] The table really functions as this barrier, doesn’t it? Also this beautiful and abstracting plane that has its own ambiguity and its own beauty.
Dr. Harris: [1:25] Look at how carefully and geometrically composed this is, how locked within that rectangle in the upper left, the horizontal line of the table, the horizontal line of the couch, the vertical line of the leg of the table. It’s like a modern Vermeer of a woman locked inside a space.
Dr. Zucker: [1:45] Yes, absolutely, except that his touch of the paintbrush, it couldn’t be further from Vermeer. This is also all about the way in which he renders the paint loosely.
Dr. Harris: [1:55] This open, luscious brushwork.
Dr. Zucker: [1:58] It’s fantastic. Look at the hand. I’m actually especially taken with her right hand, which folds in back in this very…
Dr. Harris: [2:05] Characteristic gesture.
Dr. Zucker: [2:06] But also a very complicated foreshortening to pull off. He does it beautifully.
Dr. Harris: [2:10] Again, even that arm which just looks okay to us would have looked very unfinished to a viewer in the 1870s and 1880s.
Dr. Zucker: [2:18] Unfinished, and also a pose that would have been absolutely avoided in a more traditional painting in the Academy.
[2:23] [music]
