Little Girl in an Armchair: Portrait of Lise de Bellio, later Madame Campinéanu, Édouard Manet

Exhibition Label: "Corpus," Apr-2012, Susan Earle While representative of Manet’s Impressionist style, and especially his sketchy brushstrokes, this painting also captures the youthfulness of this girl. She is poised and quite dressed up, yet she also looks lively and active, as if she just flopped down for an instant to rest from her activities. Manet’s distinctive paint handling parallels the sense of motion and vitality that the girl exudes. With her exposed right shoulder and sizeable necklace, however, the girl also seems more adult than one might expect for her age. The sitter is the niece of the Romanian expatriate Georges de Bellio, one of Manet’s doctors and patrons. Manet painted two portraits of the seven-year-old Lise; the other is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Archive Label 2005, Debra Thimmesch: The sitter is the niece of the Romanian expatriate, Georges de Bellio, one of Manet's doctors and patrons. Manet painted two portraits of the seven-year-old Lise; the other is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The Spencer's picture has been referred to as a preparatory sketch for the Nelson's portrait--the sitter wears the same clothing in both images--but one scholar has suggested that it is a distinct although perhaps unfinished work. One account of the making of the Spencer's portrait states that Manet may have been dissatisfied with the picture and scraped it in anger with his palette knife. However, an integral part of Manet's technique was the building up and scraping away of layers of pigment to create a more diverse textural surface. Some areas of the portrait have been restored to repair earlier damage, but it retains the sense of dynamism common to works by Manet with its lively, gestural brushwork. Archive Label 1999: The sitter is the niece of the Romanian expatriate Georges de Bellio, one of Manet's doctors and patrons. Manet painted two portraits of the seven-year-old Line; the other, more finished example is in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The Spencer picture has often been called a preparatory sketch for the Nelson's portrait-the sitter wears the same clothes-but one scholar has suggested that it is an unfinished separate work. Manet may have been unsatisfied with the painting: one account states that he scraped the picture in anger with his palette knife. However, scraping was an integral part of Manet's technique of building up a painting with layers of color. The portrait has suffered greatly over the years and is much restored.