Selbstbildnis mit Palette

Manet had reached his late forties without ever painting himself. Then, around 1879, he did it twice in a single year, the same stretch of time when his health began to fail from the illness that would kill him a few years later. This is one of those two. He shows himself standing like a Paris man about town, in a top hat and a good jacket, a brush held loosely in one hand, rather than hunched at an easel. The pose comes straight from Velázquez, who had painted himself with brush and palette inside Las Meninas, though Manet pushes his own figure forward and lets the background dissolve into brown. He never sold it. When his widow finally let it go, long after his death at 51, it had become one of the most sought-after portraits he ever made.