| Over the course of Edouard Manet's (1832-1883) career, the artist completed more than one hundred portraits. Nearly three-quarters of them are portraits of women. His continued return to the genre is at first confounding given its traditional limitations, but an examination of his portraits of women with regard to his engagement with Realism makes clear this choice. Manet's shift from Gustave Courbet's public-oriented Realism towards a Realism of a more private type has gone little explored to date. Yet it is this move, from objectivity to subjectivity, from depicting contemporary life to exploring painting as a construct---from out to in---that has distinct consequences within Manet's portraiture. It is these profound connections that I will explore in this dissertation.;I begin the discussion with Manet's portraits of performers and establish the meaning of construction in Manet's work. Here I also introduce the fundamental transactional nature of portrait painting, which is of critical importance to the artist. In chapters two and three I focus on Manet's society portraits, portraits of women with whom he engaged in a public setting. In these works Manet continues to position painting's constructedness against the realities of contemporary life. Moving from the most public figures in Manet's life to the most private, in the final chapter I address the portraits of his wife Suzanne Leenhoff and his colleague Berthe Morisot. In these portraits Leenhoff comes to stand for Manet's paintings created outside of the studio and Morisot those within. It is in these pictures that we find the ultimate connection between female portraiture and Manet's artistic goals.;Manet's Realism and portraiture become more interrelated as we move inward to the women closest to him, suggesting that the biographies of these women are critical to his artistic expression. I have therefore included an appendix with a biographical dictionary of his female sitters. By examining Manet's portraits of women in light of his Realist agenda, I address both why Manet repeatedly returned to the genre and how these portraits of women, constantly overlooked in his scholarship, extend the critical dialogue already established around the artist. |
