Madonna of the Rabbit

In the 1850s the Louvre was where a young painter went to learn. Copyists set up their easels in front of the old masters, and Manet was one of them. This is his copy of Titian's Madonna of the Rabbit, the Virgin seated in a meadow with a white rabbit under her hand, Saint Catherine holding up the Child, and a shepherd off to the side. He made it at the size of the original and with unusual care, then kept it in his studio for about 20 years. In January 1875 he sold it to the baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure. After 1937 it was not shown in public again until 2017, when it came to the Louvre as a bequest of the Milanese industrialist Bernardo Caprotti. He asked that it hang beside Titian's original, in Room 711, the room of the Mona Lisa.