The Lost Notebook of Edouard Manet by Maureen Gibbon
“The Lost Notebook of Edouard Manet” by Maureen Gibbon is a memoir in the form of a daily diary in which Manet tells of his health, the sanitarium, the gardens, his paintings, and his lovers. Eliza was his trusted friend to whom he gave this notebook before he died. Manet is the narrator and he is having hydrotherapy at a house they rent in the country. Before this, his uncle took him to museums and they spent hours walking there. In Bellvue, he goes into the garden and smells the peonies. That’s enough pleasure for him.
He paints Beaudelaire’s mistress, Jeanne Duval who is going blind but still sits for her portrait. She’s in pain all the time. He writes a note to Mery and doesn’t mind if she knows he’s suffering. She’d never demanded anything of him except pleasure. She’d tell him to wait for her and he did every time. The next day he and Leon walk to the river and are surrounded by dragonflies, awe on the men’s faces. Manet wants to paint the moment with the paint itself. How does one paint the experience of time going on, he asks himself. He remembers birds like old friends, storms, playing dominoes, watching porpoises, a breaching whale, and sharks curious about humans. He recalls coming home to Paris and the long voyage, later thinking of the sea and sailors.
Mery says he notices every little thing about women, like the hands of the piano teacher and the tight skirt around her legs and her thighs. When he goes outside to paint someone must set up the easel and the chair and the paints. It’s better than painting inside the room. He packs and sends off a painting to the Salon because he needs the money for his treatments, and perhaps someone will buy it.
He paints his mother in a big hat and writes about wooing a woman young enough to be his daughter. When Tonin comes to see him he sees in Tonin’s look that he’s no better. His left leg still drags and he can’t walk uphill. He walks with Tonin close by and after Tonin leaves he doesn’t go for his massage. He does not want to be touched. He never used to think about his legs, they simply took him places. Women who modeled for him desired him as much as he did them. He finds and captures a salamander by bending his body and leaning to the ground. He’s pleased at this movement of his body and remembers how as a boy he’d climb and crawl on the wooden horse at the gym.
His painting “The Execution of Maximilian” is returned to him after a tour to Boston and New York without selling. In November he returns to Paris to his large studio though there’s not enough to fill it even with canvases hung one above the other. He has Leon hang paper on the walls waist high and three feet tall so he can sit while drawing dragonflies one after another. From his painting of The Execution of Maximilian, he’s forced to see the firing squad as well as those being executed. The viewer sees the moment the bullets strike the victims. He had painted his dissent and concern, lifesize. He’d been rejected for his moral choices as well as his color and line. A friend comes and buys a painting of asparagus for eight hundred francs and Manet almost cries. But then the friend sent 1000 francs.
One day, Manet buys a new easel for Berthe Morisot but he can’t remember her address and he gets dizzy—vertigo he calls it— and makes his way to his room. The next day he remembers her street. He calls still-lifes the touchstone of painting with his ability to evoke feelings and aromas of them. At cafes, he tried to be part of the scene in the boulevards, forms the subject in his mind, and sketches it. Days or months later he paints it. Berthe sends him a locust made of paper painted yellow like gold with a portrait of her inside.
The treatments might be useless at the clinic, he says, and that expense can be avoided. He recalls his days at sea and the time he caught a shark and ate a porpoise and crossed the equator. Then he saw Rio and thought of going to America when he was seventeen, having an adventure.
In March of 1881, he won a salon medal that meant he’d have his work accepted without question. The vote of the jurors was seventeen yea to sixteen nays. Nevertheless, he’s pleased and goes on to thank those who voted yea. Perhaps the medal was for the twentyone times he’d brought his best work to them to no avail. Maybe he got the medal for still being alive. And he’ll take it for that.
People ask what his plans are now since the medal. He doesn’t know what the next “Olympia” or “The Execution of Maximilian” will be, only that it will not be like those works. He thinks about the painting “Olympia” and the woman who modeled for it. He’d pick Victorine and Denise up at the factory, then take them out to dinner, and feel he knows everyone he sees.
Suzanne comes outside and says cows like music when Leon comes out with a fife. The cows gather around them, listening. When he makes his dinner he adds laudanum which soothes him. The recipe is in the notebook. A new doctor gives him new medication but he doesn’t tell the old doctor. It brings him hope.
When he paints the barmaid at the Folies Bergere it’s exciting and masterful. She’s the savage barmaid, named Suzon. The day she comes to pose it’s rainy and her bangs are stuck to her forehead. She ties her hair back and this is how he wants to paint her, like a little girl. He talks of the painting in his notebook and how it draws one’s eyes to the central figure, to the tag on one’s senses. She’s the center, “an altarpiece of modern life,” he writes, to be viewed at eye level.
Will Manet complete his series of working persons like the barmaid? Will he win more awards or will his artistic peers continue to ignore his talents? Find out in this wonderful historical novel on the new fiction shelf of your local library.