As I head back to my hometown of Toledo, Ohio for the upcoming holidays to visit with family later this week, I look forward to taking in the Manet: Portraying Life exhibition set to close on January 1, 2013 at the world class Toledo Museum of Art, which happens to be the exclusive North American venue for the exhibition. According to the Toledo Museum of Art’s website, the exhibition includes about 40 works of art from numerous museums and private collections spanning the globe from Denmark, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Portugal, and Spain, to the United States.
French artist Edouard Manet (1832-1883), often referred to as one of the Fathers of Impressionism, is considered a contemporary of the Impressionists and was the “most stylish of the 19th-century French painters and a major recorder of Parisian life at that time.” Manet: Portraying Life represents the first up close examination of the artist’s significant talents as a portraitist. Manet had the extraordinary ability to make his subjects appear to life on canvas as viewers often tend to become curious about these people and their lives when admiring a Manet painting. The French artist was known to paint his family and friends as well as the artistic, literary, and political figures of his day, favoring casual settings over traditional style portraits.
The exhibition will open at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in late January, the co-organizer of Manet: Portraying Life with the Toledo Museum of Art, after its run in the United States.
To access the Toledo Museum of Art’s secondary curriculum materials relating to the Manet exhibition, please click here.