Red-chalk drawing of child in Italian collection attributed to Édouard Manet

A red-chalk drawing of a crouching child found in a private northern Italian collection has been attributed to Édouard Manet by art historian Emily Beeny. The newly reported attribution raises the possibility of adding an unpublished study to the artist’s known work, though the child’s identity and the drawing’s purpose remain unresolved.

The Guardian reported the discovery on 28 September. Beeny, chief curator of the Legion of Honor at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, specialises in French paintings and drawings from the 17th to 19th centuries. Her assessment rests on features of the drawing and a faded studio stamp revealed by ultraviolet analysis, according to the report.

How the drawing came to light

Francesco Baccanelli noticed the work while visiting what he described to the Guardian as a small, little-known collection in northern Italy. The owner pointed out an inscription on the reverse of its mount identifying the drawing as Manet’s, but said no art historian had studied it. Baccanelli sent a photograph to Beeny for her opinion.

Beeny told the Guardian that the image gave her an immediate sense of recognition. Although people had previously sent her works they thought might be by Manet, she said this was the only one that had prompted that response. Baccanelli said he became more convinced of the attribution as he studied the sheet and then contacted her.

A study with no known finished painting

The sheet measures 20.5 by 17.5 centimetres and is marked with a grid for transferring a design to a canvas. Despite that preparation, no corresponding finished composition by Manet is known, the Guardian reported. Beeny said the effort spent on the drawing and the decision to square it suggested the artist was pleased with the study, while its intended use remains unclear.

The Guardian places the work alongside red-chalk life studies Manet made in the 1850s and 1860s, relating them to paintings including The Old Musician and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. The Courtauld holds another Manet red-chalk drawing, La Toilette, dated 1860, which it identifies as preparation for an etching. Its collection account says red chalk was unusual by the middle of the 19th century and connects Manet’s use of it to his interest in earlier artists such as Rembrandt.

Beeny has suggested that the crouching figure might be the child with a similar hairstyle who appears at the left of The Old Musician. She presented that connection as a possibility, not an identification. The child in the drawing has not been named, and the resemblance does not establish that the same person posed for both works.

Identity and history still open

Beeny and Baccanelli have also considered Alexandre, a youth Manet hired in the late 1850s to clean his brushes and palettes and who sometimes posed for him. According to the Guardian’s account of their research, however, the drawing appears to show a girl perhaps around six years old. Neither suggestion settles who the child was.

Research described by the Guardian traces two sales of the drawing in the 1930s, first in Germany and later in Switzerland. The work had not appeared in scholarly publications on Manet. That sales history leaves its earlier whereabouts unclear; Beeny and Baccanelli wrote that both its original purpose and early history remain mysterious.

The Guardian said the pair’s findings were scheduled for the October issue of The Burlington Magazine. Beeny hopes the drawing will be considered for the next edition of the Manet catalogue raisonné, but the Wildenstein Plattner Institute had not yet studied it when the report appeared. For now, the attribution is the assessment of the two researchers advancing it, with the proposed connection to The Old Musician and the child’s identity still open.