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| Édouard Manet At the café ca. 1879 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Édouard Manet Basket of fruit ca. 1864 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Édouard Manet Plums ca. 1875 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
EXPEDITION
My grandfather's sister's husband, an unsuccessful painter in Europe who through his marriage had come into a fairly large estate, which he owed to my grandfather's industry, left at the turn of the century on – as he maintained at the time – a scientific expedition to Argentina and stopped over in some coastal city. He had announced that the duration of the expedition, and thus of his stay in South America, would be four months; he is supposed to have been involved in a scientific topic with which, without exception, all of our ancestors have been concerned and in which some of them achieved fame by their publications on precisely this topic. After the four months had passed, my great-aunt heard no more of her husband, who had, up to that point, written to Europe from time to time. One day she received, in the mail, her husband's wallet with a note saying that her husband had taken a horse in that coastal city and had ridden off and not returned. According to eyewitnesses, there were terrible storms around at that time, and it was assumed that he had died in these storms. Nor was there any sign of the horse. My grandfather's sister therefore had to come to terms with the death of her husband, who was originally from Eger, and she was left alone with the twelve-year-old daughter her husband had also abandoned. Sixty-two years after her husband had ridden off in South America and had, as she certainly believed, died, she learned from Le Monde, which she had read every day for forty years, that her husband, sixty-one years after being declared dead by the Austrian authorities, had in fact only now died in Rio de Janeiro, unmarried but surrounded by women who looked after him, and as a world-famous painter who, as Le Monde wrote, had given South American art a new impetus and an international repute, using the same name that he had lived under in Europe but with an 'o' at the end. Immediately, his widow, who had, in the meantime, grown very very old but not so old that she could not read Le Monde anymore, and her daughter had considered recovering by legal means what was now known to be their husband's and father's massive estate.
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| Édouard Manet Game of croquet 1873 oil on canvas Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt |
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| Édouard Manet Croquet at Boulogne 1871 oil on canvas Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City |
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| Édouard Manet Masked Ball at the Opera 1873 oil on canvas Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo |
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| Édouard Manet Portrait of Victorine Meurent 1862 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Édouard Manet Rochefort's Escape ca. 1881 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Édouard Manet Toilers of the sea 1873 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Édouard Manet Lady in pink ca. 1879-81 oil on canvas Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden |
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| Édouard Manet The Old Musician 1862 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Édouard Manet Spanish Ballet 1862 oil on canvas Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Édouard Manet View of the Paris International Exposition 1867 oil on canvas National Gallery of Norway, Oslo |
LEGACY
It was for the same artist whose story I have just told that my great-grandfather built a large and, by the standards of the day, sensationally equipped studio at a spot that the artist himself had been allowed to select, an eminence overlooking the Wallersee, where, for a painter, the most favorable of all light conditions prevail. With the money that the studio alone cost, as my relatives kept reiterating, they could have bought and modernized several farms. Shortly after the studio was finished, the person for whom it was built left, as I have already reported, for South America and disappeared and was declared dead, and the studio lost its true purpose. As I have often been told, it was – being an outstanding attraction in this uncultured peasant area – always marveled at, but in the end it was nonetheless allowed to fall into total disrepair. For a long time the farmers in the area, who were all related to us in one way or another, found a use for the paintings by the painter who had, for whatever reason, emigrated to South America – gigantic canvases on which he painted only his idiosyncratic notion of Jesus Christ – as tarpaulins, for which purpose, as one can well imagine, they were exceptionally well suited. Of course, these canvases were only used by the farmers with the image of Christ on the inside.
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| Édouard Manet Mocking of Christ 1865 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
Above, two of the stories from The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in German in 1978, translated by Kenneth J. Northcott and published by University of Chicago Press in 1997