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Lot Essay
Émile Munier was born in Paris and lived with his family at 66 rue des Fosses, St. Marcel. His father was an artist upholsterer at the Manufacture nationale des Gobelins and his mother was a polisher in a cashmere cloth mill. Émile and his two brothers, François and Florimond, were talented artists and each spent some time at the Gobelins themselves. During the 1860s, Munier received three medals at the Beaux-Arts, and in 1869 he exhibited at the Paris Salon. He became a great supporter of the Academic ideals and a student, follower, and friend of William Bouguereau, whose subject matter would be an important inspiration to the young artist. By the early 1870s, Émile had left the Gobelins and devoted himself to painting full-time. The exceptional draftsmanship and high degree of finish so essential to Bouguereau’s art is also clearly evident to a very high degree throughout Munier’s oeuvre.
Though Munier lost his first wife shortly after the birth of their son Émile Henri in 1867, he remarried in 1872, and scenes of children and domestic tranquility, as in the present painting, became an important theme in his work. Here, a woman in a richly appointed room has laid aside her needlework in order to allow her daughter to sit next to her so that they can look through an album of pictures together. Though Munier’s own wife and daughter, Marie Louise, were frequently subjects of his paintings, the little girl’s hair in this painting is much lighter than in any images of Marie Louise, and she is likely not the subject here. They do, however, appear to have been friends or at least occasional models of Munier’s, as he depicted the same mother and a younger daughter in his Portrait of a Mother and Daughter, dated 1885.
Though Munier lost his first wife shortly after the birth of their son Émile Henri in 1867, he remarried in 1872, and scenes of children and domestic tranquility, as in the present painting, became an important theme in his work. Here, a woman in a richly appointed room has laid aside her needlework in order to allow her daughter to sit next to her so that they can look through an album of pictures together. Though Munier’s own wife and daughter, Marie Louise, were frequently subjects of his paintings, the little girl’s hair in this painting is much lighter than in any images of Marie Louise, and she is likely not the subject here. They do, however, appear to have been friends or at least occasional models of Munier’s, as he depicted the same mother and a younger daughter in his Portrait of a Mother and Daughter, dated 1885.