A Bundle of Asparagus

In 1880 the collector Charles Ephrussi commissioned this still life from Manet and agreed a price of 800 francs. Pleased with the result, Ephrussi sent 1,000 instead. Manet's reply was to paint a second, tiny canvas of a single stalk of asparagus and send it over with a note saying there had been one missing from the bunch. The bundle here is done with the loose, confident brushwork of his last years, the pale spears laid across dark leaves and caught in a cool studio light. Ephrussi, a critic and editor who moved through fashionable Paris, later became one of the models for Charles Swann in Proust's novel. Manet had only a few years left when he painted it, already ill and increasingly drawn to small, quick subjects like this one.