Autumn

Toward the end of his life Manet planned a set of four paintings, one for each season, each embodied by a fashionable Parisian woman. He finished only two. The woman here, seen in profile in a heavy fur against a flowered background, is Mery Laurent, a friend and one of the muses of the poet Mallarme's circle. The commission came from Antonin Proust, a childhood friend who had become minister of fine arts. Manet was already gravely ill when he worked on the series, and he died in 1883 before he could paint winter or complete the cycle. The profile pose, formal and still, deliberately echoes the portrait medallions of the Italian Renaissance.