Bildnis der Marguerite Gauthier-Lathuille

In the 1870s Edouard Manet and his painter friends used to gather at a restaurant in the Batignolles quarter of Paris run by a man known as Pere Lathuille. This is a portrait of the owner's daughter, Marguerite, made around 1878 and meant as a gift for her father. She is dressed all in white, and the picture is really a study in whites, the dress, the hat and the pale ground behind her, pulled apart with quick, visible strokes. Oddly, she never actually sat for the finished canvas. Manet worked it up from sketches, which may be why she feels a little distant, more an arrangement of light tones than a close likeness. The museum in Lyon bought it in 1902, nearly twenty years after his death.