Materializing a Legacy: The Posthumous Restrikes of Édouard Manet’s Etchings

Although the prints of Édouard Manet (1832–1883) have received considerable scholarly attention in the past five decades, the posthumous restrikes of Manet’s etchings have yet to be adequately addressed. The three main posthumous sets—the Gennevilliers private familial edition (ca. 1893–94), the Dumont edition of thirty impressions (1894), and the Strölin edition of one-hundred impressions (1905)—are the largest editions ever published of Manet’s prints, not just in quantity but also quality as they embody the entire course of the artist’s graphic career. Importantly, seventeen out of the thirty plates were never published during the artist’s lifetime, and were only known to his intimate circle until the production and circulation of the 1894 Dumont and 1905 Strölin editions. The posthumous restrikes have yet to receive a focused assessment of their own in their nature as objects that came into fruition and shaped histories after the artist’s death. In an effort to address this gap, my thesis examines the posthumous printing and collecting of Manet’s etchings at the turn of the century, observing their role in the development and sustenance of the artist’s posthumous reputation. The decade following Manet’s death not only was a new era for the appreciation of prints by both artists and collectors alike, but also marked a fundamental shift in the perception of Manet’s prints specifically, leading to their very literal renaissance. I argue that the posthumous printings played a part in the etiological currents between the market for, historiography of, and the shaping of cultural identities surrounding Manet—functioning both as the product of their time as well as a force that nurtured the posthumous legacy of Manet. By closely examining the artist’s posthumous etchings, their implications, and the networks surrounding their production and circulation, we may reconceive Manet, not through his role as artist of the nineteenth century, but rather as an object of the twentieth century that manifests Auguste Poulet-Malassis’s ever-quoted device on the artist, “Manet et manebit [He remains and will remain].” Keywords: Manet; Édouard Manet; posthumous; Prints; Etchings; Technique; Collecting; 19th Century France; 20th Centur