UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Professor Nancy Locke’s research centered on the life and artwork of 19th-century French modernist Édouard Manet has inspired the first-ever exhibition that explores the artist through the lens of the complex familial relationships between and amongst Manet and his sitters. Locke is a professor of art history and director of graduate studies in the Department of Art History in the College of Arts and Architecture.

The exhibit “Manet: A Model Family,” on display through Jan. 20, 2025, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, comprises owned and borrowed works to shed new light on the life and masterpieces of the “father of modernism.”

Locke began researching Manet when she was a doctoral candidate in the early 1990s. After more than a decade of work, Locke published the book “Manet and the Family Romance” in 2001.

Locke’s research for the book moved beyond the well-established historical record of Manet, which looked at the artist through stylistic and social lenses, by approaching the research with a novel and more personal analysis.

“I was convinced that there were these questions of gesture, pose and gaze of particular models, especially his family members,” Locke said. “I felt there was a need in art history for a historical approach to Manet that looked at the psychology of the work in a way that was biographical.”

For more than two decades, the book has stood as a cornerstone for art historians and as Diana Seave Greenwald, curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, said, positioned Locke as the foremost expert on Manet's family, their biographies and the ways they interacted with one another.

Greenwald was introduced to Locke’s book when she was in graduate school in 2013 and engaged with the work more deeply as she began curating the museum’s exhibit.

“It is a revelation to have many of the family images together in the same place,” Greenwald said. “I hope people will come away with an understanding that while the Manet family was complicated, it was also a nexus of love and creativity.”

In collaboration with Greenwald, Locke helped the museum prepare for the exhibit with several contributions to the exhibition catalogue including a catalogue essay, catalogue entries and biographical sketches.

For her catalogue essay, Locke focused on a portrait of Manet’s mother, Madame Auguste Manet. The oil on canvas portrait, completed in 1866 and a part of the Gardner Museum’s permanent collection, depicts his mother as a widow wearing customary black mourning clothes years after the death of his father in 1862.

In the essay, based on more recent research, Locke examines the sitter’s dress, jewelry and her appearance as a widow. While researching, Locke discovered a photograph of Manet’s mother as well as art criticism of when the painting was first exhibited in London, England, in the early 20th century, all of which was not known in Manet literature.

“The wonderful thing about this exhibition is that it is not a retread,” Locke said. “The exhibition has its own story to tell, and I’m delighted to be a part of it.”