Suzanne Manet am Klavier

Suzanne Leenhoff came into the Manet household in 1849 as the piano teacher for Édouard and his brothers. She was a serious musician who played Schumann and Wagner, and in the final months of the poet Baudelaire, Manet's close friend who died in 1867, she went to his sickroom and played for him. Manet painted her at the keyboard around that same time, seen in profile, absorbed in the music, on a small canvas barely larger than a sheet of paper. A year later Degas painted the couple with Suzanne at this same piano and gave the picture to Manet as a gift. Manet took a knife to it, slicing away the side that showed his wife, and the two friends did not speak for a while.