Porträt des Zacharie Astruc

Manet painted this in 1866, the year after his Olympia scandalised the Paris Salon and made him notorious. The sitter, Zacharie Astruc, was one of the few critics who defended him in print, and a friend who had written the verse that hung beside Olympia. Astruc was a poet, composer, sculptor and enthusiast of almost everything, and Manet crowds the little still life at the left with his passions. There are books and a pen for the writer, Japanese prints for the collector newly obsessed with Japan, a folded fan and a red sash for the lover of Spain. Behind him a woman moves through a doorway into a second, brighter room. In 1908 the museum in Bremen bought it, among the first in Germany to take a major Manet.