Brussels, February 2001

I moved into a new studio dedicated entirely to painting.

At the time, I was a frequent visitor to a second-hand shop in my Brussels neighbourhood where, several times a week, objects of all kinds were deposited in a garage sale. It was a wonderful place to find treasures and give them a new lease of life.

One evening in February, I was taken aback by a framed print emerging from a cardboard box. I remember recognising, without knowing why, something like the look in Victorine Meurent's eyes in Manet's painting ‘Le déjeuner sur l'herbe’. Without hesitation, I grabbed the frame, paid the - derisory - price at the till and hurried home to examine it more closely, with a magnifying glass.

Sitting in the middle of the print, facing right, seen almost from the back, a woman crosses her legs, her face turned towards the viewer. With both arms over her breasts, she is trying to conceal her nudity with a veil that one of the men behind her is trying to remove. With his left hand, a second bearded man, on the right, urges the woman to let go.

Two lines at the bottom: Lectissima Virgini Annae Roemer Visschers, illustri Batauia sijderi, multarum Artium peritissima, Poetices vero studio supra sexum celebri, rarum hoc Pudicitiae exemplar Petrus Paulus Rubenus L. M. D. D. Bottom left: P. P. Rubens pinxit Right: Lucas Vorsterman sculp and bottom: et excud A’ 1620.

Finally, under the dedication, in a single line: Cum priuileaijs, Régis Christianissimi, Principum Belgarum & Ordinum Batauia.

This piece is a ‘Susanna and the Elders’ by Rubens, one of Vorsterman's best engravings, dated 1620.

A pure marvel!

A few years later, Jean-Pierre De Rycke, curator of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tournai (created by Victor Horta, the emblematic figure of the Art Nouveau movement in Belgium) gave me the opportunity to mount an exhibition. The collection of this magnificent museum contains two particular Manets: ‘Argenteuil’, an Impressionist painting produced in 1874, and ‘Chez le père Lathuille’, 1879, painted shortly before his death.

The title of the exhibition:

‘De la coupe aux lèvres, ou du désir d'indiscrétions’.

from Manet to Séroux

Intuitively, I'm adding the Rubens engraving to the exhibition,

to emphasise the gaze in Manet's work.

The paintings by Edouard Manet in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tournai have one thing in common: they invite the viewer to witness the desire of a woman and a man to meet. Both paintings show her slightly apart while he approaches her from an angle. In preparation for this exhibition, I'm studying the idea of the attraction caused by the gaze and I'm making several paintings for this exhibition.

I travelled to Australia, to Hobart in Tasmania to be precise, where I visited MONA, which houses David Walsh's collection - and more particularly the exhibition ‘Théâtre du monde’ organised by the French curator Jean-Hubert Martin.

This same trip inspired me to travel to Argentina and visit the local art centres. While preparing for this trip, I discovered that the collection of the Buenos Aires Museum of Fine Arts included a painting by Manet called ‘Surprise Nymph’.

I'm standing in front of Sausanne at the Buenos Aires Museum of Fine Arts.

It is assumed that Suzanne had an affair with Edouard Manet as well as with her father, Auguste. This situation raises questions about the paternity of her son Léon Köella Leenhoff, born in 1852, who will always be presented as her younger brother and Manet's nephew.

This situation was not uncommon in the Parisian bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century.

century. Later, Edouard and Suzanne lived together discreetly, unbeknownst to Auguste Manet. They married on 2 October 1863, a year after the death of Manet's father.

The couple, along with Léon, returned to live with Edouard's mother.

A natural, Suzanne maintained good relations with her mother-in-law, for whom she played the piano on Tuesday evenings to entertain guests. Edouard Manet had an extremely rich social life, in which Suzanne played no part. It was made up of his repeated infidelities.

Edouard Manet used her as a model before their marriage, notably for the ‘Nymphe surprise’ and, according to some sources, for ‘Le déjeuner sur l'herbe’, substituting her face for that of Victorine Meurent. Thereafter, we find her duly dressed in bourgeois settings, comfortably seated on a sofa or at her piano. Suzanne's last portrait, ‘Madame Manet à Bellevue’, dates from the summer of 1880, less than three years before the painters' deaths.

The presence of Suzanne's brothers in numerous paintings testifies to the good relations between Manet and his in-laws.

Ferdinand, a painter and sculptor, is depicted in ‘Le déjeuner sur l'herbe’ in 1862 and Rodolphe, the youngest, in Argenteuil in 1874, wearing a canoe.

In his will, Manet named Suzanne as his heir and, after her, Léon Leenhoff.

Manet had wanted his work not to be dispersed, but Suzanne and Léon did not hesitate to ‘retouch’ some of his canvases to obtain a higher price. Having inherited her husband's income, we can assume that Suzanne always lived comfortably.

She died at the age of 75 in 1906 and is buried in her husband's grave in the Passy cemetery, where Berthe Morisot and Eugène Manet also lie.

Her brother Ferdinand made the bust on the painter's grave.

2015, I'm off to Svalbard for a total solar eclipse on 20 March

In Oslo, I saw this by chance. 

Suzanne Leenhoff was born on 29 October 1829 in Zaltbommel, a small town in the centre of the Netherlands. She was the eldest daughter of Carolus Antonius Leenhoff (1807-1878) and Martina Ilcken (1807-1876). Her father was a carillonneur, organist and music teacher. She was the eldest of seven children. Legend has it that Franz Liszt, on a trip to Holland, heard her playing the piano and encouraged her to continue her musical studies in Paris. It is much more likely that she went to live with her grandmother in Paris, near Manet's house. In any case, she moved there in 1847, with her mother and four siblings following later.

Suzanne played the piano very well and was hired by the Manet family around 1849 to give piano lessons to the Manet brothers: Edouard, aged 18, and Eugène, aged 17.