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| Édouard Manet Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa ca. 1874 pastel Louvre |
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| Édouard Manet Woman with a Cat ca. 1880 oil on canvas Tate Gallery, London |
In 1997 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted an exhibition and published a well-illustrated catalog in an effort to reassemble some portion of the personal art collection of Edgar Degas, dispersed in a series of sales after the artist's death in 1917. The Private Collections of Edgar Degas (available here from the Museum as a free e-book) explores the artist's relationships with several other 19th-century giants of painting – Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Daumier, Morisot, Gauguin, Pissarro, Cassatt, and of course the friend and rival Édouard Manet, acknowledged master of Impressionist brush-work. Today's selection is restricted to the Manets once owned by Degas, who asserted that the Blue Sofa in pastel at top was one of his three favorite pictures in the world (the other two favorites unfortunately not named).
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| Édouard Manet study for The Departure of the Folkestone Boat 1869 oil on canvas Swiss private collection |
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| Édouard Manet study for The Execution of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico ca. 1867-68 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Édouard Manet Gypsy with cigarette 19th century oil on canvas Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Édouard Manet Berthe Morisot in mourning 1874 oil on canvas Private collection |
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| Édouard Manet Cats' Rendezvous 1868 lithograph Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
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| Édouard Manet Seated woman wearing a soft hat ca. 1875 wash drawing Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco |
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| Édouard Manet Olympia 1867 etching, aquatint Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Edgar Degas Édouard Manet leaning on a table ca. 1864-68 wash drawing Louvre |
Manet and Degas painted, drew, and etched each other repeatedly. This friendly and creative habit could also lead to conflict. Degas painted Manet below, lounging on a sofa and listening to his wife play the piano. Degas gave the painting to Manet. It hung in the Manet apartment until Manet grew dissatisfied with his wife's likeness, which he came to regard as unflattering. (Manet's own painting of his wife at the piano in exactly the same position is included at bottom for comparison, although Degas never owned it.) With the boldness of a very close friend and fellow-painter, Manet simply sliced off a strip of the painting and excised his wife's face. When Degas saw the mutilation, he angrily took back the painting. There is a photograph of it hanging in the Degas apartment in its truncated state, but then at a later date Degas added a strip of canvas the same size as the strip Manet sliced off. Evidently Degas intended to restore the painting to its original appearance, but never carried the intention through. With its right end blank, it now hangs in a provincial museum in Japan.
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| Edgar Degas Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet ca. 1868-69 oil on canvas Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan |
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| Édouard Manet Madame Manet at the Piano 1867-68 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay |