Cows in the Pasture

In the spring of 1873 Manet had his one real Salon success. Le Bon Bock, a bearded man with a pipe and a glass of beer, took an honourable mention and pleased even the critics who had spent a decade going after him. That summer he took his family to Berck, a fishing town on the Channel coast, and worked there through the season on boats, the beach and the flat country behind the dunes. This is one of the smallest things he brought home from it, a panel a little over 20 centimetres across, with cows standing in a meadow. From the same weeks came Les Hirondelles, his wife and his mother sitting out in that grass, which the Salon jury turned down the following year.