Monk in Prayer

A monk kneels with his arms spread wide and his eyes closed, a skull on the ground in front of him. Manet painted him around 1865, and the Museum of Fine Arts points to Francisco de Zurbarán, the 17th-century Spanish painter of monks and saints in bare cells, for the narrow range of colour, the empty setting and the hard light. The quick, broad brushwork in the face and the habit is Manet's own.

He kept the canvas for some 17 years. In January 1882, the year before he died, he sold it to his friend Marcel Bernstein, the father of the playwright Henri Bernstein, for 6,000 francs. Bernstein lent it to the memorial exhibition of Manet's work at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1884. Some time after that the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche acquired it from him in exchange for a small landscape by Charles-François Daubigny, the Barbizon painter. Blanche kept it until 1935, when it went to a New York gallery, which sold it to Boston for 51,000 dollars.