Portrait of George Moore

Orange-gold hair surrounds a pale, unevenly lit face. Beneath it, a patterned cravat disappears into a dark coat whose shoulders spread across the lower half of the image. Édouard Manet’s portrait of George Moore brings these colours together with conspicuously separate strokes of pastel. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the work to 1879.^[1]

Moore was a writer who also left an account of sitting for Manet. His recollections offer a view of the painter at work, while the portrait gives his own face a memorable, slightly unsettled presence.

A Face Built from Coloured Marks

The head turns slightly towards the viewer’s left. Moore’s eyes look in that direction beneath pale eyebrows, while the mouth remains visible through the moustache. The features have enough definition to make an individual likeness, yet their surfaces are divided into strokes that seldom merge into a continuous skin tone.

Yellow and cream illuminate the forehead and cheek. Cool blue-grey marks gather around the eyes and run beside the nose; pink touches warm the eyelids and ear. The face is pale, but its pallor contains many colours. A few darker lines establish the nose and mouth without enclosing every part of the head within an equally firm contour.

The beard changes the balance. Orange, ochre and reddish-brown strokes build a broad shape around the lower face. Its warmth makes the nearby blue and grey passages more apparent. Above, the hair sweeps across the forehead in larger, flatter strands. Light marks interrupt its brown surface, and a projecting lock carries the movement towards the right-hand edge.

The two sides of the face are visibly different. One cheek is more brightly exposed, the other more broken by shadow and beard. The eyes do not form a perfectly level pair. Unequal contours and differently angled marks give the likeness its particular character.

The Coat and the Cravat

The dark coat provides a substantial base for the head. Its broad lapels turn towards a small white collar, framing the coloured neckwear between them. Along one shoulder the boundary is broken into loose marks; along the other, a more continuous edge separates the garment from the grey background.

Manet varies the description within the clothes as well. Pale streaks suggest folds and seams across the black fabric, while other passages remain comparatively broad and quiet. Small light gaps break through the dark strokes. The coat reads as a single garment even though its surface never becomes uniformly dense.

The cravat has a different rhythm. Blue, grey and muted pink marks cross one another in short diagonals. They suggest patterned material and changes of fold without tracing every thread or repeating the pattern mechanically. Between the open collar and the meeting lapels, this little area of restless colour carries the eye upwards towards the beard.

A Painter Who Became a Writer

Born in Ireland, George Moore studied art in Paris before turning towards writing. His experience of the city’s artists later informed criticism intended to introduce developments in French painting to an English readership. Articles appeared in the periodical press before being gathered into books including Impressions and Opinions in 1891 and Modern Painting in 1893.^[2]

The picture itself contains no book, manuscript or professional emblem. Moore’s identity as a writer must be learned from outside the image. Within it, hair, face, neckwear and dark clothing carry the interest. This keeps the portrait close to the physical encounter rather than turning it into a catalogue of literary achievements.

Moore Remembers the Sittings

In Modern Painting, Moore recalls Manet speaking to him at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes. He describes visiting the studio the following day and being invited to sit because his fair colouring appealed to the painter. Manet’s first intention, in this account, was a café portrait: the setting in which he had encountered Moore would also become the setting of the picture.^[3]

Moore remembers admiring the golden colour of his hair as Manet painted it, then watching the artist scrape away the paint and begin again. Repeated attempts, he says, could regain the brightness without becoming muddy. The canvas nevertheless failed to satisfy Manet and was eventually destroyed.^[3]

That story concerns an oil portrait. The Met describes the surviving pastel as executed in one sitting.^[1] The distinction matters when looking at its open handling: the repeated repainting of hair in Moore’s recollection does not describe the making of these particular pastel strokes.

Moore’s account is also an argument about painting. He admires Manet’s responsiveness to colour and describes his skill as instinctive. The praise grows from remembered observation, but its emphatic judgments belong to the writer. His description of Manet’s handling of colour combines the experience of a sitter with the preferences of a critic.

Pastel and the Portraits of Friends

Writing in French in 1906, Théodore Duret explains Manet’s growing enjoyment of pastel through its possibilities for light, vivid neighbouring tones and varied faces. He places Moore among the men whose likenesses Manet made in the medium, alongside the artist Constantin Guys and the musician Cabaner.^[4]

Duret reads Moore’s appearance as belonging to an early phase of artistic and poetic aspiration. He interprets the portrait’s distracted air as something Manet had seized and accentuated, contrasting it with the novelist Moore later became.^[4] This is a contemporary’s later reading of the likeness, rather than an explanation supplied by the face itself.

Pastel also connects the work with Manet’s drawings. Here, a coloured stroke can define an edge and remain a visible line at the same time. The brow, the collar and the cravat show this particularly clearly: small marks describe recognisable things without surrendering their own shape.

Another Moore at the Café

The Met also owns a separate, unfinished George Moore at the Café, dated 1878 or 1879. It is an oil on canvas, 65.4 × 81.3 cm, and entered the collection as a gift from Mrs. Ralph J. Hines in 1955.^[5]

This horizontal composition gives the sitter a setting and a different posture. Wearing a hat, Moore rests his head against one hand at a table. The opposite hand lies near a tall drinking vessel. Dark lines establish the hat, sleeves, lapels and table edge, while large areas of the pale ground remain lightly described.

The contrast with the pastel is substantial. The café oil arranges a whole upper body through bent arms and surrounding objects. The pastel brings the head forward and makes the relation between warm hair, pale flesh and dark clothing its central event. One presents the sitter at a table; the other concentrates attention on his face.

Moore’s recollection of a destroyed café portrait should remain distinct from this surviving unfinished work.^[3][5] His story preserves the difficulty of achieving a likeness, while the two museum objects allow us to compare different surviving arrangements of the same sitter.

From Exhibition to Book Illustration

The pastel was exhibited in 1880. The Met records that critics mocked it with a French nickname meaning “the drowned man fished out of the water”.^[1] The pale face and irregular features that give the portrait its force could also invite hostile description.

Duret recalls Manet showing a group of works, with pastels prominent among them, at the premises of La Vie Moderne in April 1880.^[4] This setting placed his experiments in portraiture before a public beyond the private exchange between painter and sitter.

The image later entered another kind of public life. According to the Met, Moore used it as a frontispiece for Modern Painting.^[1] A portrait once subjected to ridicule could therefore accompany the sitter’s own writing about art. It became an image of the critic as well as a likeness made by his friend.

Today the pastel belongs to the Met’s H. O. Havemeyer Collection, through the 1929 bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer.^[1]