Portrait of a Man

By 1860 Édouard Manet was 28 and only a few years out of the studio of Thomas Couture, the academic painter he had trained under and then quarrelled with. He had not yet shown at the Salon, and none of the pictures that would soon make his name notorious existed. What he was doing in these years was painting the people around him. This is one of them, a man in a dark coat against a plain brown ground, his face caught in a warm, even light. The trouble is that today no one is quite sure who he was. The old catalogue offers two names, each with a question mark after it: the celebrated Italian singer Rubini, or Paul Roudier, a friend Manet had known since boyhood. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo lists it simply as Portrait of a Man. Roudier turns up again a few years later in Manet's croquet scene, looking straight out at the viewer.