Toter Uhu

Manet painted this in 1881, in Versailles, where he had gone to rest. He was seriously ill by then, his legs failing him, and had less than two years to live. Unable to keep up the pace of his big Paris pictures, he took up a few hunting trophies instead, and this dead eagle owl is one of them, hung head down from a nail by a knotted cord against bare wooden boards. He was never really a painter of the hunt, so the subject is a little unexpected, a large night bird reduced to dark feathers and dead weight, worked in short, quick dabs. Between the bird's feet you can still make out the single nail and the two knotted ends of the rope that hold it up.