A red chalk drawing showing a crouching child has been identified by an art historian as the work of Édouard Manet after it was spotted in a private collection in Italy. The drawing, which came to light by chance, was attributed on the basis of stylistic comparisons to the French painter's known works.
The child depicted in the sheet has not been identified. Observers have noted a strong likeness to a street urchin figure that appears in Manet's painting The Old Musician, a composition in which the artist sought to convey the dignity and humanity of homeless and marginalised people.
Manet, a central figure in the development of modern French painting, often worked from drawings and studies that informed his oil compositions. Red chalk was a medium he and his contemporaries used for preparatory sketches and figure studies; similarities in posture and facial treatment have formed part of the basis for the recent attribution.
The attribution comes from a single art historian and will be of interest to scholars and institutions that track provenance and authorship of 19th-century works. Further technical examination, provenance research and scholarly review would normally follow such a claim before the drawing could be broadly accepted as an autograph work by Manet.
The discovery underscores how works in private hands can surface and prompt reassessment of artists' oeuvres. The drawing's emergence may stimulate additional study of related sketches and the models who appear across Manet's paintings, but the child's identity remains unknown pending further research.