Long-Lost Drawing May Be a Previously Unknown Manet

A drawing that has spent decades in an Italian collection is now believed to be a previously unknown work by Édouard Manet.

The small red-chalk study shows a child crouching on the ground, according to The Guardian, which first reported the discovery. Francesco Baccanelli, an Italian art historian who encountered the work in a private collection in northern Italy, told the outlet he became interested after noticing that its mount carried an old attribution to Manet. He subsequently brought it to the attention of Emily Beeny, chief curator at the Legion of Honor at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a specialist in French art.

Their research, which will appear in the October issue of The Burlington Magazine, argues that the drawing is indeed by Manet. One significant piece of evidence came from ultraviolet examination, which detected the remains of the artist’s studio stamp.

Beeny also found the artist’s hand in the drawing itself. Its handling resembles the red-chalk studies Manet made in the 1850s and 1860s, a period when he was looking closely at Renaissance drawing. She identified details in the modeling of the figure, including the treatment of the hands and the contrast between illuminated and shadowed areas, as consistent with Manet’s work.

Exactly who Manet drew is, however, a mystery. The child resembles a young figure in The Old Musician, his 1862 painting of people living on the edges of Parisian society. Researchers have considered whether the model could have been Alexandre, a young assistant who occasionally sat for Manet, though Beeny believes the drawing more likely depicts a girl, perhaps around six years old.

There is another unresolved question. Manet divided the sheet into a grid, a technique that would have allowed him to enlarge the figure for use in a painting. Researchers have yet to identify a finished work for which the drawing might have served as a study.

The drawing wasn’t entirely unknown before its recent reexamination. Researchers found records showing that it changed hands at auctions in Germany and Switzerland during the 1930s. It nevertheless escaped the Manet scholarship that followed. For now, the attribution remains outside the artist’s catalogue raisonné. Beeny hopes the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which is preparing its next edition, will examine the work for possible inclusion