Le Fumeur

Catalogue number: SO 0089
Artist: Édouard Manet
Date: 1866
Medium: Etching
Dimensions [to plate mark]: 154 x 238 mm
Catalogues: Guerin 48
State: I/I
Publication: EDOUARD MANET (1832-1883) Trente Eaux-fortes originales, Paris, A. Strölin, Ancienne Maison L Dumont, 27 Rue Lafitte, 1905.

Subject

A bearded man smoking a pipe. This is the first of two versions of the subject that Manet produced in 1866. He appears to have abandoned this first sketch at an early stage of its development in preference for a larger plate. The second version of the subject is reversed, suggesting that Manet may have employed some form of counter-proof in his process. Both images are freely-executed ‘reproductions’ of Manet's own painting La bonne pipe a.ka.The Smoker (1866) now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Printing

This impression was probably printed by Alfred Strölin in 1905 for his folio EDOUARD MANET (1832-1883) Trente Eaux-fortes originales. Strölin acquired Manet's plates from Jeanne Dumont, widow of the engraver Louis Dumont who had bought the plates from Suzanne Manet and printed his own edition of thirty impressions in 1894. Strölin produced a further one hundred impressions of thirty of Manet's etchings before cancelling the plates. Strölin was also the cousin of Richard Gutekunst, an important dealer of etchings in London before the first World War (SO 0038 was bought with a Gutekunst label amongst others on the back of its frame) and whose stock of etchings, including works by Legros and Seymour Haden, was confiscated as enemy property by the British government in 1914.

History

Purchased online at auction from Bubb Kuyper, Amsterdam on November 28, 2025