Long-Lost Red-Chalk Drawing Attributed to Édouard Manet

A small red-chalk drawing of a crouching child, held for decades in a private collection in northern Italy, has been identified as a previously unknown work by Édouard Manet, according to research set to appear in the October issue of The Burlington Magazine.

The Guardian first reported the discovery. Italian art historian Francesco Baccanelli encountered the drawing in the private collection and became interested after noticing that its mount carried an old attribution to Manet. He brought the sheet to the attention of Emily Beeny, chief curator at the Legion of Honor at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and a specialist in French art.

Their joint research argues that the drawing is by Manet's hand. A key piece of evidence came from ultraviolet examination, which detected the remains of the artist's studio stamp on the sheet.

Beeny also found the artist in the drawing's handling. The study's touch resembles the red-chalk work Manet produced in the 1850s and 1860s, a period when he studied Renaissance drawing closely. She identified details in the modeling of the figure — the treatment of the hands and the contrast between illuminated and shadowed areas — as consistent with Manet's practice.

Exactly who the artist drew remains a mystery. The child resembles a young figure in The Old Musician, Manet's 1862 painting of people living on the margins of Parisian society. Researchers considered whether the model could have been Alexandre, a young assistant who occasionally sat for Manet. Beeny believes the drawing more likely depicts a girl, perhaps around six years old.

A second question is also unresolved. Manet divided the sheet into a grid, a technique that would have allowed him to enlarge the figure for transfer to a painting. Researchers have yet to identify any finished work for which the drawing might have served as a study.

The sheet was not entirely unknown before its reexamination. Records show it changed hands at auctions in Germany and Switzerland during the 1930s. It then escaped the Manet scholarship that followed, and the attribution currently sits outside the artist's catalogue raisonné.

Beeny hopes the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, which is preparing the next edition of the catalogue, will examine the work for possible inclusion. Until then, the crouching child remains outside the official record of one of French art's most closely documented painters.