Edouard Manet, 'Woman with a Cat', about 1880-2

A middle-aged woman, apparently lost in thought, sits on a couch or sofa in the corner of a room. A black and white cat sleeps peacefully on her lap. We are looking at one of Manet’s most relaxed and intimate portraits of his wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, and their pet cat Zizi.

Much of the brushwork looks quite rough. Shapes and shading are suggested with broad, angular strokes. The zigzags of blue across Suzanne’s chest appear to have been painted with extraordinary speed and confidence. Here, Manet must hardly have lifted the brush from the canvas. He also used just a few simple strokes to create the glint on the gold picture frames, and the blue, white and yellow tie-back on the curtain.

The sitter’s face and hair are more carefully finished. But Manet focused most of his attention on the textures of the cat’s fur and its moody, feline face. These have the greatest density of brushwork and a complex mix of colours. The contrast may be because Manet wanted to emphasise the cat. Cats certainly fascinated him, and he sketched and painted Zizi several times. Different cats also feature in two of his most important paintings, Olympia (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and Luncheon in the Studio (Neue Pinakothek, Munich).

However, the difference in the details is probably also because the picture seems to be unfinished. A layer of grey paint was applied to the whole canvas as a primer, but much of it is left uncovered. It shows through the brushstrokes in many places, especially around the edges of the painting. There is also no signature, which Manet often added as a finishing stamp. But since the picture was almost certainly painted for personal reasons rather than for sale, this tells us little.

The painting’s lack of finish gives us an insight into Manet’s technique of ‘peinture claire’ or ‘bright painting’. This method involved lighting faces or figures from the front, almost eliminating shadows. Because oil paint takes a long time to dry, he could do this while the paint was still wet so that the edges blurred and the colours merged slightly. You can see this effect in the area between Suzanne’s hand and her left cheek.

Suzanne was an accomplished musician. The couple met when she was appointed as his piano teacher. She was 19 and he was 22. Their relationship was complicated. She had a son the following year, possibly through an affair with Manet’s father Auguste. Edouard and Suzanne then became secret lovers throughout their 20s, and finally married in 1863, a year after Auguste died.

Manet painted Suzanne a number of times. The exact date of this picture is not known. It was probably made in 1880 or later and so counts as his last portrait of her. He may have been still working on it when he died in 1883.