Der Selbstmörder

Manet painted this small, unsettling picture in the late 1870s, when his own health was failing and death was on his mind, though he told the public almost nothing about it. A man has just shot himself. He lies slumped back across a bed, the pistol still in his hand, and around him there is nothing, a plain room, a chair, a bare wall. Painters before Manet had dressed such scenes with meaning, a lesson, a moral, a note of tragedy. He strips all of that out. There is no story offered and no verdict, only the fact, laid down in quick, direct brushwork. Manet gave the painting away in 1881 to help a sale for a hard-up composer friend, Ernest Cabaner. He himself had two years left to live.