Vintage 1962 Manet “Lola de Vence” Portrait Art Print

A vintage 1962 full color print of Manet's paiting Lola de Valence (1861-62) hand tipped in on heavy vintage paper, affixed to chipboard backing, and set in a 10.75" x 12.75" heavy dark metallic frame.

Commentary on the work circa 1962:

This portrait of the Spanish ballerina is one of Manet's finest and most exciting works. The audience, glimpsed on the right, throbs miraculously with life. The artist reveals himself to be confident, incisive, both brilliant and substantial-in my opinion, faultless. He was never to surpass this color, which appears here in its full force. As for the Spanish influences which inspired this picture, there is little evidence of them aside from some faint reminiscences of Goya. With Lola, modern art had scored an outstanding success.

Baudelaire, rarely voluble in Manet's praise (in fact, he mentioned his friend only in relation to the exhibition of etchings in 1862), wrote a quatrain describing Lola's inescapable charm, comparing her to a pink and black jewel:

Entre tant de beautés que partout on peut voir, Je comprends bien, amis, que le désir balance;

Mais on voit scintiller en Lola de Valence

Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose et noir.

These lines had as a subtitle, "Inscription for the painting by Edouard Manet." Before appearing in Les Epaves in 1866, the verses were first published bencath the etching of the picture issued by the Society of Etchers in 1863.

In Le Gaulois of July 4, 1872, Barbey d'Aurevilly said that Lola de Valence was too Chinese for him and he not Chinese enough for it. "But what I like better than any picture, what appeals to me right from the start, is the artist as a man, determined to trample underfoot everything commonplace and to force the recognition of initiative at the point of the sword." Speaking of the much-criticized portrait of the prima ballerina of the Spanish company then in Paris, Edmond Bazire said that the picture "committed the considerable error of being a sincere reproduction, a real and striking portrait of a finely built woman." Manet must certainly have flattered his subject a little. This is immediately apparent when one compares the tall figure here with the heavy figure shown in Le Ballet Espagnol.

The folios in the Drawing Collection at the Louvre contain a watercolor of Lola (figure 13), one of the most dazzling and finished of Manet's works in this medium. Manet used this study for his etching of Lola and for the lithograph on the cover of Zacharie Astruc's serenade, Lola de Valence.