oil on canvas, 73 x 106 cm
1873
Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
by Édouard Manet (1832-1883)
| John Prince wrote: | |
| Manet must have liked it as he kept it near him in his studio until his death. I guess it is Steven's Paris garden as he was well established in Paris at that time. Stevens painted beautiful paintings of graceful female subjects. |
A game of croquet is in progress in the garden of Belgian artist Alfred Stevens. The ladies are about to start their turn while the gentlemen casually observe. Édouard Manet has traded his mallet for a paint brush. His colleague Paul Roudier has taken his place as the fourth player but has yet to participate actively and remains uninvolved in the background. The lady about to drive the ball is Victorine Meurent, whom Manet had already painted nude as Olympia and in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Musée d’Orsay, Paris). In La Partie de Croquet she appears middle class and sporty. [The others are Alice Lecouve and the man sitting is said to be Alfred Stevens.] In 1873, when the picture was painted, croquet was a popular leisure activity in which both sexes could participate informally. Manet no longer found inspiration in painting nude figures and historical compositions. Along with Claude Monet he had already begun to experiment with plein air painting. The protagonists of the contemporary art scene, the artists and their models, left the cities and moved to the countryside. The garden became their studio.
Manet had picked up on the theme he had already used at Croquet à Boulogne-sur-Mer, but this time with the figures are arranged diagonally to evoke distance. Manet returns to an impressionist manner in this work but the color is not broken up prismatically, as in comparable paintings by Renoir or Monet.
oil on canvas, 73 x 106 cm