If you missed seeing Éduoard Manet’s portrait of Fanny Claus at the Ashmolean Museum during the public appeal that saved it from export last year, you can see it now at the Royal Academy.

It’s in London until April 14, a key work in the RA’s trailblazing exhibition Manet: Portraying Life — the first exhibition in the UK to focus solely on the portraiture of the artist considered by many to be the father of modern art. It’s an outstanding show of outstanding portraits. And seeing the Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus within its context reminds us of many things. First and foremost, how lucky we are in Oxford that the painting called by the show’s curators “a superb example of Manet’s mastery of image making — and mastery of paint” will return to public display in our city after its year-long nationwide tour. It is an unfinished work. It could be thought unresolved, said co-curator Dr Lawrence Nicholls, but not only is it a wonderful painting it was resolved as far as John Singer Sargent was concerned for the celebrated portraitist bought it straight from the studio sale in 1884, the year after Manet’s death.

Fanny was a concert violinist, a member of the first all-women string quartet, and the closest friend of Manet’s wife Suzanne Leenhoff, a talented pianist and hostess to their regular soirées. The pensive portrait of Fanny was a study for Le Balcon (1868–9), now in the Musée d’Orsay and sadly not in this show. This picture of a group of people on a balcony was one of the first in which Manet depicted close friends. That remote look of Fanny’s, that disengaged quality, is seen a good deal in this show. The young man has it in The Luncheon, a complex picture with no questions answered; The Street Singer too; and it’s there in the faraway gaze of the nude in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Courtauld Gallery’s smaller version of this controversial work is on show).

The exhibition’s premise is to explore the many crossovers in Manet’s work between portrait and genre scenes. He constantly blurs boundaries between the two, ignoring convention. In so doing, his portraits give us a flavour not only of his own world, one of close friendships with the intelligentsia — Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé among them — but also of Parisian society in the 19th century. Committed to modernity, taking risks, painting what he sees in front of him, not being bound by detail, he asks his models, whether family, friends or professional, to role play in everyday scenes of his making. Not that he worries about narrative. We are left to work it out for ourselves. What is going on in The Luncheon, for example? Why does the boy, dramatically forced up against the picture plane, look beyond us? What about the enigmatic woman in The Railway, and what is her relationship with the girl? The more you look into it the more fascinating it becomes. And even the apparently simple portrait of Fanny, destined for that green balcony scene, we want to know more of her: why that absence of engagement? Blacks and whites are Manet’s forte, his portrait of Zola is magnificent: pitch black jacket, startlingly white book, plus quill pen and pamphlet paying homage to the writer’s support for the controversial artist who repeatedly faced rejection and ridicule. It’s the black and the resoundingly successful use of dark and light as well as beauty that makes the three quarter portrait of painter Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets so very effective. He plays with colour. Look at how they’re minutely dotted about Music in the Tuileries Gardens (filled with key figures from Manet’s world, exhibition curator MaryAnne Stevens calls it a “cultural self-portrait”; here, judged so important it’s given a room of its own). Look again at The Railway, the colours in the flowers on her bonnet cleverly picked up in moments all over the canvas, likewise the jardinière’s colours in The Luncheon. Fifty portraits, and not one looks like another stylistically. Forever changing, forever forward-thinking, this is Manet, this is portrait painting at its very best. l Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus returns to public display in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 2014.

 

Royal Academy of Arts, main galleries
Until February 14
Visit royalacademy.org.uk