Vincent Manago was born in Toulon in France in 1880. He migrated to North Africa and then to France and painted landscape views and street scenes.
Vincent Manago was a very popular painter in Marseille between 1900 and 1913, where his work was shown at the Foire internationale de Marseille and at the Exposition Coloniale des Paysages d’Afrique et de Provence. He specialised in landscape, marine and genre paintings of the Mediterranean coast (Port de Martiques, La Rochelle, Venice) and in Orientalist painting. The latter showed the influence of his stay in Tunisia and Algeria on his art. He used vivid colors in his paintings. As would other Orientalist artists, he also used scenes depicted on postcards as inspiration for his paintings. One such postcard, Négresse pétrissant la Galette dans la Guessâa was used for his 1903 painting of a street scene of a young woman sorting through grains in a bowl. At least four different versions of this painting were made, one of which is in the Musée des beaux-arts, Marseille.
In addition to being a painter, Manago also worked as a decorator of several private residences in Tunis and Alger. His oldest son Dominique Manago, born in Tunis in 1902, also became a painter and so did his youngest son Armand, born in Paris in 1913, who changed his artist name to A.M. Guérin. Vincent Manago lived in Paris until his death on 30 June 1936.
Selected paintings
- Maisons de pecheurs et barques a Martiques, no date.
- Vue du port de Martigues, no date. Oil on canvas, 33×46 cm.
- Prière du soir au Maroc (Evening prayer in Morocco), no date. Oil on wood panel, 46×77 cm.
- Le grand Canal à Venise (Grand Canal in Venice), no date. Oil on canvas, 47×69 cm.
- Rue animée à Tunis (Street view in Tunis), no date. Oil on panel, 46×61 cm.
- La Rochelle, no date. Oil on panel, 46×55 cm.
- Retour du marché (Return from the market), no date. Oil on canvas, 46×38 cm.
- Scène de rue en Algérie (Street scene in Algeria), 1903. Oil on canvas, 41×61 cm. Musée Cantini, Marseille, France.