The Balcony by Édouard Manet

Brilliant green ironwork cuts across two white dresses. Matching shutters frame a dark room, from which a man in a blue tie looks out. The seated woman at the front directs her attention elsewhere; the standing woman holds gloves and a closed parasol. They occupy the same narrow space, but the painting leaves their shared occasion unexplained.

Édouard Manet worked on The Balcony, or Le Balcon, in 1868–69 and exhibited it at the Salon of 1869.^[1] The picture brings portraits of friends into an arrangement that makes colour, architecture and the act of looking unusually conspicuous. Its people are recognisable, its objects specific. The relationships between them remain much harder to settle.

A Gathering Seen from Outside

The painting places us outside the balcony, looking towards its occupants. The ironwork crosses the foreground, while open shutters mark the sides. Behind the figures, the interior recedes into darkness. These three layers give the view a clear structure even though they provide little information about the apartment as a whole.

The seated woman occupies the nearest position. Her white skirt spreads across a substantial part of the lower canvas, and her dark head stands out against the room behind. One forearm rests along the boundary above the front ironwork. She holds a closed fan close to her body, introducing a small, firm object among the folds of her dress.

The standing woman at the right is set farther back. Her clothes make a narrower column of white, rising towards a floral head decoration. A closed green parasol passes diagonally across her hands and towards the edge. The man stands between the two women, his dark clothes bringing him closer in tone to the room than to their dresses.

The heights and positions prevent the group from settling into a simple row. The seated figure is nearest, the standing woman is displaced to the side, and the man occupies a deeper level. Their faces point in different directions. Each seems to attend to something beyond the immediate group, leaving the viewer to imagine a surrounding world that the canvas scarcely shows.

That missing world is part of the picture’s attraction. The balcony would allow its occupants to look down or across a street, but we see neither the street nor the event that might interest them. Their outward attention becomes something we observe from another position. We look at people who have themselves come to a place for looking.

The Force of the Green

The railing has a visual importance comparable to that of the figures. Its horizontal bars extend across the canvas, joined by uprights and repeated diagonal forms. Small circular details give the pattern points of emphasis. The green is strong enough to remain distinct against pale dresses, darker furniture and the floor.

Its pattern makes the foreground difficult to enter imaginatively. We can follow a dress down towards the ground, but the ironwork repeatedly interrupts it. A body seen through the bars becomes a sequence of separate areas. The figure remains continuous in our understanding while the painted pattern divides its visible surface.

The shutters establish another kind of repetition. Their horizontal slats rise along the sides of the opening, enclosing the more irregular shapes of heads, sleeves and hands. Together, shutters and railing give the people an architectural framework. The repetition makes a change of direction in a face or arm feel especially noticeable.

The same green performs several tasks. It describes painted metal and wood, gives the building a recognisable appearance, and ties the edges of the composition to its foreground. Colour becomes a means of connecting objects separated in depth. The side shutters and nearest bars can therefore feel close together on the surface, even as the figures stand between them in the represented space.

White increases the green’s force. The women’s clothing offers large, luminous areas against which the railing reads with particular clarity. Darkness does something similar around the upper bodies, making faces, collars and the blue tie more conspicuous. Manet creates a powerful arrangement from a small number of large contrasts, then complicates it through the details within them.

The architecture also gives the painting a rhythm that continues beyond any one person’s pose. The bars remain regular while the people turn, sit and hold things. That difference helps explain why the balcony itself is so memorable: it supplies an order within which the human encounter stays unresolved.

Faces, Clothes and Small Gestures

The seated woman’s dark hair and eyes give her face a concentrated presence. A green ribbon and pendant mark the throat, linking her clothing to the surrounding architecture without making it identical in colour or material. Her head turns away from the more frontal arrangement of the body. The difference gives the pose an alertness that resists a simple description as passive sitting.

Her dress opens into broad folds and changes of white and grey. Some passages establish the shape of a sleeve or skirt very quickly; others break into finer marks near trim and edges. The garment occupies considerable space. It gives the nearest figure both a physical volume and a large pale form through which the eye moves across the lower picture.

The standing woman’s clothing has a different effect. The upper body is more upright, the skirt narrower in its visible extent. Her pale face appears beneath a bright cluster of flowers. The hands gather around gloves and the closed parasol, bringing several small objects into a concentrated area before the torso.

Those hands suggest an activity without completing it for us. She may be arranging or holding her accessories, but the exact sequence remains suspended. We can follow their overlapping shapes more confidently than we can name a passing thought. Her pose belongs to the social presentation of a dressed figure who has come towards an opening.

The man’s blue tie introduces a vivid accent within the dark upper half. His white shirt and waistcoat make a pale frame beneath the head. One hand rises near the chest while the other is held lower against the coat. Their different levels add movement to a figure whose expression and body remain comparatively restrained.

The contrast among the three faces is important. They receive different degrees of definition and occupy different relations to light and shadow. The painting does not give every sitter the same kind of prominence. Looking at a group portrait becomes a matter of noticing those differences, alongside the names attached to the people.

The Room, the Flowers and the Dog

The dark interior is more than an empty patch behind the group. A fourth figure can be discerned at the left, along with indications of a vessel. A framed picture hangs higher at the right. Other glints and shapes remain difficult to separate. The room suggests a furnished, inhabited space without allowing it to be inspected continuously.

This partial visibility changes our sense of the balcony. The bright figures have emerged from a domestic interior whose depth is largely withheld. The threshold divides light from shadow as well as inside from outside. A face near the opening can be unusually clear, while another person only a short distance behind becomes difficult to recognise.

At the lower left, a flowering plant supplies a more accessible detail. Blue and pale blossoms gather above broad leaves, and the white pot carries a blue pattern of its own. The plant extends another kind of life towards the opening. Its rounded flowers and irregular foliage interrupt the railing’s repeated angles.

Near the seated woman’s feet, a small dog appears beside a reddish ball. Its patches of light and dark fur introduce a compact presence beneath the much larger expanse of white fabric. The animal encourages attention towards a part of the picture that the faces might otherwise overshadow. It also makes the narrow foreground seem occupied at several different scales.

Flowers, pot and dog can attract as much close inspection as a hand or face. That distribution of attention is one of the painting’s distinctive effects. A group of human portraits coexists with small objects and living things whose painted particularity keeps drawing the eye away from the expected centres of interest.

Friends Taking Roles in a Painting

The seated woman is Berthe Morisot; the man is the painter Antoine Guillemet; the standing woman is the violinist Fanny Claus.^[1] Their identities connect the scene with Manet’s artistic and musical circle. They also distinguish the painting from an anonymous illustration of people watching a street.

Morisot was already a practising artist who had exhibited at the Salon when she met Manet in 1868. Diana Seave Greenwald’s account places her first appearance as his model in The Balcony. Their friendship later gained a family connection when she married his brother Eugène in 1874.^[2] Her place in the picture belongs to a relationship between artists as well as one between painter and sitter.

Claus was a close friend of Manet’s wife Suzanne, herself a musician. The Ashmolean’s account identifies her as a violinist and records her participation in the development of the composition.^[3] The painting brings people from an existing circle into a scene whose social circumstances are less specific than their biographies.

The figure in the shadowed room is often identified as Léon Leenhoff, Suzanne’s son.^[2] The limited visibility of his face makes his position very different from that of the three principal sitters. He remains part of the household world behind them, while the women and man near the opening become conspicuously available to the outside gaze.

These names add knowledge without supplying a complete story. The friends did not have to be engaged in a single documented event for Manet to arrange them together. Their poses could be developed through sittings and revisions. The finished group gives familiar people roles within a new image, while leaving their private relationships larger than the scene.

The Earlier Portrait of Fanny Claus

The Ashmolean Museum preserves Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus, painted in 1868, a separate canvas measuring 111 × 70 cm. It records an earlier arrangement in which Claus sits at the left and Morisot stands at the right. Manet subsequently developed the finished Balcony on another canvas, changing their positions.^[3]

The comparison makes the revision unusually tangible. In the earlier picture, Claus’s face and floral head decoration occupy the main light area. Her white dress falls over a seat whose cushion and legs are clearly visible. A green shutter rises behind her, while railing bars cross the front. At the right edge, the standing woman survives only in part.

The Ashmolean’s educational account explains that the earlier canvas was cut, leaving Morisot truncated.^[4] That surviving edge belongs to the history of this first arrangement. The picture is not a piece removed from the finished Orsay canvas. It preserves a different stage in the development of the subject.

Moving from this version to The Balcony changes more than the identity of the seated figure. Morisot’s expanded skirt gives the final foreground a broader pale mass. Claus becomes a standing presence at the right, with gloves and parasol helping organise her pose. The man and shadowed interior contribute to a more complex distribution of bodies and attention.

The earlier canvas also makes some of the setting easier to see. The exposed seat and lighter surrounding passages encourage a more continuous reading of the space. In the final painting, the dark interior and stronger contrasts produce a more abrupt movement between visible and concealed areas. Manet’s revision changes the experience of the threshold as well as the grouping of his friends.

John Singer Sargent bought the earlier canvas at Manet’s studio sale in 1884. It remained with his family’s descendants before the Ashmolean acquired it in 2012.^[4] Its separate history now allows the making of the celebrated group to be approached through a work in which the same people occupy different pictorial roles.

The Dialogue with Goya

The balcony arrangement has a significant Spanish precedent in Goya’s Majas on a Balcony. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the celebrated composition as an image of women seen from the street, with male companions behind them. Its account connects that device with Manet’s exploration of the boundary between public and private life.^[5]

A related version in the Met, dated about 1800–1810, is currently attributed to Goya. The museum leaves open whether it is a variant by the artist or the work of a close follower.^[5] It offers a useful comparison while retaining that uncertainty. Its identity should be kept distinct from the famous version now in a private collection.

In the Met canvas, two women sit close together behind a dark railing. Their heads incline towards one another, and their arms rest near its upper edge. Elaborate light clothing, veils and small pieces of jewellery create a lively foreground. Behind them, two cloaked men rise into a darker, more sparsely described area.

Manet redistributes this relation between light figures, dark companions and a balcony seen from outside. His women occupy different heights, with a man between and behind them. The shutters make the opening more emphatically architectural. The brilliant green bars have a different visual force from the darker, comparatively simple railing in the Met picture.

The comparison helps reveal the ambition of the later work. An older composition becomes a way to organise contemporary acquaintances, fashionable clothing and an urban threshold. The people’s identities and poses change the encounter, while the inherited device gives it a history beyond the immediate household scene.

The connection is clearest in the arrangement: people display themselves towards an outside world, while that world looks back at them. The balcony can sustain many different kinds of social encounter.

Between the Apartment and the City

Theodore Reff places the balcony among the architectural motifs through which Manet addressed modern Paris. It offered an extension of private space towards public life, a possibility also explored by younger painters.^[6] The setting therefore has a particular usefulness for an artist interested in how people see and are seen.

The figures remain attached to the apartment. Furniture, a flowering plant and the shadowed room connect them with domestic surroundings. Their outward faces and open shutters place them in relation to the city. The railing marks the point where those two experiences meet, giving them somewhere to appear without fully entering the street.

Manet leaves the direction of that outward attention open. A viewer can imagine movement below, a neighbour across the way or an event passing outside. The canvas does not select one of these possibilities. Its social interest develops from the gathering’s relation to a world beyond the frame.

The Railway later gives an iron barrier another function. There it separates figures from a working railway space, and steam obscures the view beyond. In The Balcony, the barrier belongs to a domestic opening and makes the occupants themselves conspicuous. The comparison shows how a familiar structure could organise very different encounters in Manet’s work.

The Salon of 1869

The painting was accepted at the Salon of 1869.^[1] Acceptance did not secure an easy reception. Its strong green, unequal definition of faces and ambiguous gathering gave critics plenty to discuss. The Musée d’Orsay recalls Cham’s sarcastic response, “Close the shutters,” and another critic’s comparison of Manet with a house painter.^[1]

Those reactions focus attention on the work’s most insistent visual decisions. The green can seem almost too assertive for an architectural accessory; flowers can invite closer inspection than a face; the people fail to explain their presence through a clear exchange. Features that now help the picture hold attention could disturb expectations of a more agreeable, legible group scene.

Théodore Duret’s 1906 account describes the response as ridicule and dwells on complaints about the green balcony, the women’s clothing and the small dog. He contrasts this response with the deference audiences supposedly granted idealised historical subjects.^[7] Duret was defending Manet, and his sweeping description of the public belongs to that advocacy.

His argument nevertheless identifies a useful tension. Contemporary clothes and ordinary objects could make viewers feel qualified to pronounce on what they saw. A familiar dress or dog offered something apparently easy to judge. Manet’s arrangement made those everyday things participate in a kind of painting whose priorities could be harder to accept.

Recognising the people and objects gives an initial foothold. Following the unequal attention paid to them, the strong colour relationships and the uncertain connection between their gazes makes the encounter more demanding.

Morisot beyond the Role of Sitter

The seated Morisot is a commanding presence, but the relationship that produced the painting continued beyond this appearance. Recent curators at the Cleveland Museum of Art describe Manet and Morisot as colleagues whose exchange could be collaborative and competitive. They collected one another’s work, and Manet borrowed motifs and compositional ideas from her.^[8]

Morisot came to the sittings with a painter’s experience of making images. Her career extended well beyond the roles she occupied in Manet’s work. The portrait belongs within a continuing exchange between fellow artists.

Further portraits, including Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets, offer different encounters with the same person. The Balcony remains distinctive for placing her within a group whose members appear connected by space and acquaintance while their individual attention stays separate.

Caillebotte’s Collection and the Public Museum

The painting passed through Manet’s estate sale in 1884 and entered Gustave Caillebotte’s collection. The French state accepted it under Caillebotte’s bequest in 1896 for the Musée du Luxembourg. It later moved through the Louvre and Jeu de Paume before being assigned to the Musée d’Orsay in 1986.^[1]

These moves gave the once-disputed group a public setting in which its models, sources and making history could be studied together. The earlier Claus canvas now adds another perspective, allowing a change in the arrangement to be seen alongside the finished work.

The green remains immediate. It catches the eye before every face has become distinct, then leads across clothing, furniture, flowers and the dog. Following it brings the separate parts into relation without resolving the occasion. The painting leaves its friends at the threshold, conspicuously present to us and still attending to something we cannot see.