Antonin Proust

In 1879 Manet set himself a test. His old school friend Antonin Proust, by then a member of parliament, later wrote that Manet wanted to paint him on a plain white canvas with no preparation, in one sitting. He was working at the same time on Chez le père Lathuille, a couple flirting in a Paris restaurant garden, and both pictures were meant for the Salon, the great annual exhibition run by the state. Proust remembered that Manet used up seven or eight canvases before the portrait suddenly came all at once, with only the hands and parts of the background held back. At the Salon of 1880 it was hung, Manet complained in a letter, badly placed on an angled wall beside a door. In the same letter he recalled how quickly he had dashed off the glove held in the bare hand, and how Proust had begged him to stop, not one stroke more. The dedication to his friend is still there in the lower left corner, with the date 1880.