Ashmolean shows Manet portrait it hopes to keep

Museum launches campaign to raise £7.83m required to buy portrait of Mademoiselle Claus for the nation
Ashmolean museum Manet portrait
Manet's portrait of Mademoiselle Claus on display at Ashmolean Museum. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images Europe

It has not been seen in public for 29 years, but yesterday Édouard Manet's Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus went on display at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, launching a campaign to save it for the nation.

The unfinished 1868 painting depicts a young violinist, Fanny Claus, the close friend of Manet's wife Suzanne Leenhoff, sitting pensively on a balcony. It was a preparatory study for the Le Balcon (1868–9), one of the major works of the impressionist movement, which hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. "I find it difficult to over-emphasise the importance of this picture," said Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean. "Manet is a profoundly radical artist and this is a key picture – in some ways it's more radical and more appealing than Le Balcon."

The painting was bought by artist John Singer Sargent in 1884 and has remained in the UK since, though it has only been displayed in public once, at a 1983 National Gallery exhibition of Manet's work.

It was sold to a foreign buyer before Christmas for £28.35m, but the government placed a temporary export bar; on it in the hope that someone would come forward to keep the painting in the UK.

The painting's heavy tax liability means that, under a private treaty sale, a British museum or gallery is entitled to buy the work at the comparatively knock-down price of £7.83m. Now the Ashmolean are mounting a bid to buy it for their collection before the new a deadline runs out in August.

"This is not really a conventional portrait – it's a study of form and colour," said Brown. "It's the very beginning of the impressionist movement, looking at people as objects to be studied. There's a link with an artist like Lucian Freud who approaches his portraits in a very similar way. Although painted in the 1860s, it has echoes today."

Brown acknowledged that in a time of austerity, raising £7.83m for a picture will not be easy. he museum will go to the Art Fund, which assists public institutions to buy works of art, particularly those threatened with export; the Heritage Lottery Fund; and "private individuals who are in a position to help".

Manet's works rarely come onto the market and command high sums when they do: last June, a Manet self-portrait set a record for the artist when it was was sold for £22.4m.

Even at £7.83m the Manet picture is much more expensive than the most recent high-profile work which was saved for the nation, Breugel's The Procession to Calvary, which cost £2.7m last January. However, it is a bargain compared to the £100m required in 2009 to keep a pair of Titian paintings, Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, in the UK. Brown said that he understood that the National Gallery felt unable to buy the Manet as they were committed to the second Titian.

There are only a handful of important pictures by Manet in the UK in institutions including Kelvingrove in Glasgow and the National Gallery. Brown said that acquiring the picture would give the Ashmolean's impressionist and post-impressionist collection, which has work by Toulouse-Lautrec and Pissarro, as well as other works by Manet, "an emphasis and strength that it doesn't presently have".

If the money is not raised, the picture will go to the foreign buyer. "The options are it goes to a public collection in this country for 25% of its value where it's seen by over a million visitors a year, or it goes into a private collection abroad," said Brown. "No doubt it would be lent to special exhibitions, but it would not be generally available. The owner may put it on loan to a public institution, but I have no reason to think that's the case."