Moss Roses in a Vase

In the spring of 1882 Manet had A Bar at the Folies-Bergere hanging at the Salon, the last large picture he finished. He was 50 and seriously ill, unable to stand at an easel for long, and his doctors sent him out of Paris that summer to a rented house at Rueil. Friends who came to see him brought flowers, and those bouquets are what he painted through his last months, a run of small canvases with a few stems in a glass vase and nothing else. This is one of them, a handful of moss roses, an old garden variety named for the soft green growth that covers the buds and stems. He died the following April.