Oloron-Sainte-Marie

Paris came under siege in September 1870, and before the ring closed Manet sent his wife, his mother and young Léon south to Oloron-Sainte-Marie, a small town in the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. He stayed behind and served in the National Guard through the winter. When the armistice came at the end of January 1871 he travelled down to join them, and this canvas of the town under its mountains comes from those weeks. While he was away the Commune rose in Paris and was crushed. He sold the picture ten years later, on 29 July 1881, for 200 francs, to Louis Gauthier-Lathuille, whose family ran the restaurant at the Clichy gate that Manet had painted two years before that.