?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
ÉDOUARD MANET La Barricade.
Lithograph printed in black on grayish cream Chine appliqué on ivory wove paper, 1871. 465x334 mm; 18 3/8x13 1/4 inches, full margins. Second state (of 2). Edition of approximately only 50. Printed by Lemercier, Paris, with the address lower center. A superb, richly-inked impression of this extremely scarce, important lithograph.
As Fisher notes, "The central group of soldiers was taken directly from the lithograph The Execution of Maximilian, which a tracing on the verso of the watercolor shows," (Fisher, The Prints of Édouard Manet, Wahsington, D.C., 1985, page 93). Manet's nearly identical watercolor of the barricade scene is now in the Szépmüvézeti Museum, Budapest. Fisher continues, "The composition of the lithograph follows the outlines of the central group very closely, although in reverse, suggesting Manet used a tracing from a photograph of the drawing because the figures are slightly smaller. On the left, a soldier remains only partially traced, so that only the head shows. This figure, who in the Maximilian composition holds the raised sword, is cut off in the drawing as well. That Manet used the earlier composition [of Maximilian's execution] with its specifically republican sympathies is reinforced by a reference to Goya's painting The Third of May and his etchings from the Disasters of War series."
Stylistically, the densely-drawn figural scene in the foreground, with the execution of the single, defiantly-gesturing communard standing to the right, is contrasted with the loosely sketched, geometrically abstract city-scape background. Manet's expressive drawing of the background, using the side of the lithographic crayon, and the scribbling of lines to suggest the barricade and the building to the far right, are on par with the techinque in his contemporaneous Les Courses, 1865-72, both works boldly anticpating modern and contemporary lithography. Guérin 76; Harris 71.
