III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
The Balcony
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In 1868 Manet set three friends on a balcony and a fourth in the room behind. The painting entered the Salon, then stayed with him until he died.
At a glance
- Artist
- Édouard Manet
- Date
- 1868
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 170 × 124.5 cm (4 ft 1 in)
- Collection
- Musée d'Orsay
- Inventory
- RF 2772
Look closer
The seated figure
Berthe Morisot is the only one of the three balcony figures who sits. The centre and right positions are taken by standing companions, so her lower posture becomes the compositional weight on which the group rests. She is already a painter in her own right; six years later she would marry Manet’s brother Eugène. On the canvas she is simply the figure the arrangement will not let the eye skip.
Centre and right
Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, a painter, stands at the centre. Fanny Claus, a violinist, stands on the right. Manet has given the balcony three clear stations — seated left, standing centre, standing right — without turning them into a single social action. The genre is group portrait and figure painting at once: named people, held in place, not stitched together by an obvious story.
The half-seen fourth
Behind the balcony group, inside the room, a fourth figure is only partially obscured from full view. The identification is uncertain; the figure is possibly Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. What is certain is the formal choice: Manet built a threshold between open air and interior and then refused to populate the interior cleanly. The balcony feels complete; the room does not.
The story
Édouard Manet painted The Balcony in 1868. The work is oil on canvas, one hundred and seventy centimetres high and one hundred and twenty-four and a half centimetres wide. It belongs to the genres of group portrait, figure painting and genre art: a modern scene assembled from people Manet knew, arranged on and just behind a balcony.
Three figures occupy the balcony proper. The seated figure is the painter Berthe Morisot. At the centre stands Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, also a painter. On the right stands Fanny Claus, a violinist. A fourth figure, only partially visible in the interior behind them, is possibly Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. The painting does not label these people. Later identification has supplied the names; the canvas itself offers bodies, positions and the hard line between outside and in.
The composition is built on that line. A balcony is a public edge attached to a private room. Manet places three figures on the edge and one in the room, then withholds the usual cues that would turn the four into a readable gathering. Morisot sits while the others stand. Guillemet holds the centre. Claus closes the right. The indoor figure does not fully arrive. Nothing in the supplied record requires us to invent a shared glance or a single mood; what can be said is that the stations are distinct and the threshold is real.
Manet sent the painting to the Paris Salon of 1869. After that exhibition he kept it. It remained in his possession until his death in 1883. In 1884 it was sold to the painter Gustave Caillebotte, who left it to the French state in 1894. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, inventory number RF 2772.
The making of the picture is inseparable from Manet’s circle without being a simple record of it. Morisot was already working as a painter; her marriage to Eugène Manet still lay ahead, in 1874. Guillemet and Claus belonged to the same world of studios and acquaintance. Léon’s presence, if it is Léon, would fold the household into the street-facing scene. Manet did not need allegory to justify the group. He needed the balcony as a structure: a shallow stage with depth behind it, wide enough for three and deep enough for a fourth who almost disappears.
Close looking, then, is less a hunt for anecdote than an attention to placement. Who sits, who stands, who is centred, who is cut by the interior dark — these are the decisions the painting still puts forward. The rest of its life, from Salon wall to private keeping to Caillebotte’s bequest, is the slow path by which a canvas Manet would not part with became a public picture of modern figures who never quite explain why they are there together.
Why it mattered then
Shown at the Paris Salon of 1869, The Balcony entered the principal public arena for new French painting and offered a group of contemporary figures without the narrative scaffolding Salon visitors often expected from genre scenes. It was a portrait of living people — painters and a violinist from Manet’s own acquaintance — staged on a balcony, that ordinary Parisian threshold between apartment and street. After the exhibition Manet kept the work until he died. That choice matters historically: the canvas was not immediately absorbed into another collection or rewritten by a buyer’s taste. It stayed with its maker, then passed in 1884 to Gustave Caillebotte, and only in 1894, by bequest to the French state, into public ownership. In its own moment it was both a Salon statement and a private holding, a modern group portrait that had been seen once and then withheld.
Why it matters now
The painting still rewards slow looking because its structure has not aged into simple charm. Four figures, three stations on a balcony and one half-lost indoors, continue to ask how much a group portrait must explain. Museums now present it as a fixed public object in the Musée d’Orsay; the long gap between the 1869 Salon and the 1894 bequest reminds us that canonicity is often slow. For anyone interested in how nineteenth-century painters used friends as material without turning them into allegory, The Balcony remains a clear case: named sitters, open threshold, withheld story. It also keeps a useful uncertainty in view. The fourth figure’s identity is not settled. Living with that gap is part of what the picture still teaches.
The surprising detail
Manet exhibited The Balcony at the Salon and then kept it for the rest of his life. Only after his death in 1883 did it move: sold in 1884 to Gustave Caillebotte, another painter, who left it to the French state a decade later. A canvas first offered to the public spent its maker’s remaining years out of circulation, then entered the national collections by the will of a peer rather than by Manet’s own sale.
What is disputed
The fourth figure, partially obscured in the interior, is only possibly Léon Leenhoff, Manet’s son. That identification is not certain and should not be stated as fact.
Remember this
Three figures hold the balcony; a fourth stays half inside. Manet showed the painting once, kept it until he died, and let its group refuse a single story.
Test yourself
Manet exhibited The Balcony at the Salon of 1869 and then retained it until his death. How does that history change what the painting’s public life actually was?
It means the work had two distinct careers. First it was a Salon picture — briefly visible in the main official exhibition of new French art. Then it became a private holding for more than a decade, unseen as a market object and unsold by the artist. Its later fame depends on a second route into public view: sale to Caillebotte in 1884 and bequest to the state in 1894. The painting we treat as continuously canonical was, for Manet’s remaining years, a canvas he had shown once and chosen not to release.
Go deeper
Image: Édouard Manet, Public domain. Licence: Public domain. Source.