Seated Nude Drawing by Manet in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 2023

Title: Seated Nude

Artist: Edouard Manet (French, Paris 1832–1883 Paris)

Date: ca. 1858–60

Culture: French

Medium: Red chalk

Dimensions: Sheet: 11 × 7 7/8 in. (28 × 20 cm)
Framed: 20 7/8 × 17 9/16 × 1 3/4 in. (53 × 44.6 × 4.4 cm)

Classification: Drawings

Credit Line: The Art Institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by the Joseph and Helen Regenstein Foundation (1967.30)

This drawing belongs to a series of nude studies that Manet initiated in the late 1850s. Although he worked from a live model, his future wife Suzanne Leenhoff, he borrowed aspects of this composition from Italian precedents. The subject of the seated female nude with two attendants may draw inspiration from earlier paintings of biblical narratives involving bathing women by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn, but Manet’s omission of any clear setting or context leaves the narrative ambiguous.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/851687