This small notebook was used by Suzanne Manet, Édouard Manet's widow, to record the sales of paintings and drawings during the years 1892 to 1900. Many notes include the names of buyers and the amounts paid. There are also entries about revenues from property holdings and the deaths of the family members Berthe Morisot and Édouard Vibert.. The notebook has been flipped and written in from both sides, front to back and back to front. Only about thirty-two pages of the notebook were used, and the blank pages have not been imaged. In addition, some pages were cut out of the notebook, and the stubs of some of those pages are visible. One page contains what may be a sketch by Manet.
Provenance of the notebook
Suzanne’s notebook is part of a large collection of materials related to Manet, including more than one hundred letters, household accounts, books from Manet’s library, and photograph albums, owned in the early 20th century by the scholar Adolphe Tabarant. The collection contains Manet’s only surviving sketchbook, as well as the Lochard and Godet albums.
The collection was sold in 1960 by his daughter, Lucienne Tabarant (1898-1989), to the American writer and editor Mina Kirstein Curtiss (1896–1985), who was working on a biography of Manet that remained incomplete at her death. The Morgan Library & Museum purchased the Tabarant collection in 1974 as the gift of Jane Engelhard (1917–2004) and her children in memory of her husband, Charles W. Engelhard Jr. (1917–1971).