Étude d’arbres

Where this small study of trees belongs in Manet's life is disputed. His godson Leon Leenhoff remembered it as preparation for the Dejeuner sur l'herbe of 1863. The biographer Adolphe Tabarant placed it four years earlier, in 1859, and the standard catalogues have followed him. The site is the same either way, a wooded bank by the Seine near the Ile Saint-Ouen, a few kilometres from land the Manet family owned at Gennevilliers, where he went out to work from nature. 1859 was also the year he submitted his first painting to the Salon, the Absinthe Drinker, and the jury turned it down. He kept the study to the end of his life, and it was sold with the rest of the studio in 1884. In 2009 Italian investigators came across it among pictures held by Calisto Tanzi, head of the collapsed food company Parmalat.