Monk in Prayer
Edouard Manet
(French, 1832–1883)
1865
Medium/TechniqueOil on canvas
Dimensions146.4 x 115 cm (57 5/8 x 45 1/4 in.)
Credit LineAnna Mitchell Richards Fund
Accession number35.67
On View
On viewClassificationsPaintings
Collections
A monk kneels, arms outstretched, eyes closed in quiet prayer. A skull rests in the immediate foreground—a reference to mortality. While the restricted color palette, austere setting, and sharp lighting of “Monk in Prayer” reveal Manet’s great admiration for seventeenth-century Spanish painting—in particular, the spiritually resonant works of baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán—the broad and dynamic brushwork, especially in the figure’s face and robes, is characteristically Manet.
InscriptionsLower left: ManetProvenanceJanuary, 1882, sold by the artist to Marcel Bernstein, Paris, for 6,000 fr. [see note 1]; after 1883, exchanged by Bernstein with Jacques-Emile Blanche (b. 1861 - d. 1942), Paris [see note 2]; 1935, sold by Blanche to the Marie Sterner Gallery, New York [see note 3]; sold by the Sterner Gallery to the MFA for $51,000. (Accession Date: March 7, 1935)
NOTES:
[1] A. Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1947), pp. 103-104. Bernstein was a friend of Manet and father of the playwright Henri Bernstein. [2] In a letter to the MFA (April 17, 1940), Blanche wrote that after the artist's death (in 1883) he received this painting from Bernstein in exchange for a small landscape by Daubigny. The painting was still in Bernstein's possession in 1884, when he lent it to the Manet exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (cat. no. 25, "Un moine en prière"). He probably exchanged it with Blanche shortly afterward, though it is first documented in the Blanche collection in 1902; see Théodore Duret, Histoire d'Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris, 1902), cat. no. 62. [3] Letter from Jacques-Emile Blanche to Jacques Furst of the Marie Sterner Gallery (January 31, 1935) (Archives of American Art, Marie Sterner letters). The gallery had first offered it to the MFA in 1934.
NOTES:
[1] A. Tabarant, Manet et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1947), pp. 103-104. Bernstein was a friend of Manet and father of the playwright Henri Bernstein. [2] In a letter to the MFA (April 17, 1940), Blanche wrote that after the artist's death (in 1883) he received this painting from Bernstein in exchange for a small landscape by Daubigny. The painting was still in Bernstein's possession in 1884, when he lent it to the Manet exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (cat. no. 25, "Un moine en prière"). He probably exchanged it with Blanche shortly afterward, though it is first documented in the Blanche collection in 1902; see Théodore Duret, Histoire d'Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre (Paris, 1902), cat. no. 62. [3] Letter from Jacques-Emile Blanche to Jacques Furst of the Marie Sterner Gallery (January 31, 1935) (Archives of American Art, Marie Sterner letters). The gallery had first offered it to the MFA in 1934.
