Porträt von Julien de la Rochenoire

In his last couple of years Manet was seriously ill and could no longer stand at a large canvas for long, so he turned more and more to pastel, quicker and lighter work he could do sitting down. He made this one around 1882 in his studio on the rue d'Amsterdam in Paris, of an old friend, the animal and landscape painter Julien de la Rochenoire, who often dropped by. The sitter's stylish jacket is built from fast zigzags of black, white and grey against swirling salmon-pink and blue wallpaper. Manet made close to 90 pastels in all, most of them of friends. He was dead within about a year.