Manet's Country House in Rueil, painted in the summer of 1882, is both a happy and a sad picture. An unseen treetop casts a large shadow over the sun-drenched front of the house, just as the destiny of the fatally ill painter also overshadows this painting. Manet was to die a few months later on April 30, 1883. In July 1882, the painter went to convalesce at Rueil, a town just outside Paris, and spent three months in the house of André Labiche. Unable to move beyond his immediate surroundings, Manet painted still lifes and views of the house. In this painting, the long house dominates the background, leaving no room for the sky. On the narrow stage in the front left-hand corner is a bed of large-leafed plants with red flowers that leads us down a path toward the middle of the picture, where the viewer finds a tree hiding the porticoed front door of the house. Past the open window, one's eye finally comes to rest on the white park bench in front of the house. What looks like a typical Impressionist scene with a shimmering atmosphere of light, air, and color is in reality a highly artificial painting by Manet, the intellectual. In it, he balances garden and house, nature and civilization. The upright tree trunk and the ledge that runs like a belt around the house are both straight lines that do not quite meet in the middle of the picture. Dark is contrasted with light, the red flowers with the green of the plant leaves, the ochre of the house's facade with the bluish window ledges. The main actor is the tree: only part of it is there, but it also conceals the heart of the picture. Manet borrowed the idea of such a tree from Japanese art, perhaps from one of the Thirty-Six Views of Fuji (1823-32) by Katsushika Hokusai. Trees placed so centrally in pictures, writes Angelika Wesenberg, became "a short while later the main motif of Japanese in West European painting. We come across it, for example, in Monet, van Gogh, and Hodler."

In May 1903, Hugo von Tschudi chose a similar picture by Manet, A Corner in the Garden at Bellevue, 1880 (today in the BZèhrle Collection, Zurich), for the Berlin Nationalgalerie. But in 1904, Eduard Arnhold, who had advanced 30,000 marks for the purchase of the picture, demanded it for his own collection by paying the remaining sum of 5,900 marks. As a result, Tschudi bought Country House in Rueil for 50,000 marks through Paul Cassirer from Durand-Ruel in May 1905. His application to accept the painting for the Nationalgalerie was approved in December 1906. The money for it was donated by the Berlin banker Karl Hagen, who also gave the Nationalgalerie the money to buy a painting by Renoir, Children's Afternoon at Wargemont (1884), and, with the banker Karl Steinbart, also paid for two pictures by Monet, Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, Paris (1867) and Meadow at Bezons (1874). Unlike Arnhold, Hagen was an unknown art collector, and his gifts to the Nationalgalerie in 1906 and 1907 were probably connected to his conversion to Christianity around 1905. On his baptism, the banker, who had been called Levy, adopted the name Hagen, as his brother Louis (actually Ludwig), an influential banker in Cologne, had done before him.

Ident. No. : AI 970

Provenance:  

Sè Galerie Durand Ruel, Paris Sè June 17, 1905 Paul Cassirer, Berlin Sè June 17, 1905 Hugo von Tschudi for the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, (purchase)