Edouard Manet

Posted by summerlady in the Usenet group alt binaries pictures artpics

There's a story here. In 1868, Degas painted a picture of Manet listening to his wife, Suzanne, playing the piano. Manet hated the picture, maintaining that Degas deliberately made Suzanne look ugly. He thereupon tore off the offending portion of the painting. Degas, hearing of this unwonted vandalism, stormed back to Manet's house, grabbed the picture, and bore it off to his own house. There, he prepared the canvas, intending to re-do it. However, he kept putting it off and it now hangs in its unfinished state in a Japanese museum, thus:

Now, given that Manet's portrait of his wife (painted the same year that he mutilated the Degas work) does not exactly portray the woman as a knock-out, one can only wonder what Degas made of her.