Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
The Balcony
Edouard Manet French
Not on view
Manet had his friends model for this unconventional group portrait, which includes his first portrayal of the painter Berthe Morisot, shown seated, along with the landscape artist Antoine Guillemet and the violinist Fanny Claus. Manet’s godson, Léon Leenhoff, is barely visible in the shadowy background. The figures appear frozen and detached, trapped behind the balcony railing in the liminal space between the public street and the private interior of the dark room beyond. After seeing the painting at the 1869 Salon, Morisot wrote that it gave her “the impression of some wild fruit, a bit unripe even. . . . I look more strange than ugly.”
This image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.
