Boy with a Dog

In the early 1860s a fashion for etching swept through Paris, and a group of artists founded a society to revive the old craft of drawing on a copper plate. Manet took it up eagerly. This print of a boy with a dog was among the eight etchings he gathered into his first published set in 1862. He made it after one of his own paintings, and behind that painting stands an older Spanish one: Murillo's ragged, grinning boy playing with a dog, painted in Seville a couple of centuries before. Spain was Manet's great enthusiasm in these years, its painters his teachers at a distance, and he liked to send a motif from canvas to copper and back. The etched line is loose and quick, closer to a sketch than to the finished pictures he was fighting to hang at the Salon.