Portrait of Antonin Proust

In 1855 Manet was 23 and still going daily to Thomas Couture's studio, where he had spent five years arguing with his teacher about how to paint. He left the following year. Paris that season belonged to the Exposition Universelle, where Ingres and Delacroix each had a room of honour and Courbet, refused by the jury, charged an entrance fee to a shed of his own pictures nearby. None of that reaches this canvas, which is barely over half a metre tall and holds a single head. It has long been called a portrait of Antonin Proust, a schoolfriend from the Collège Rollin who became a journalist and, in 1881, minister of fine arts, and who used the post to get Manet the Légion d'honneur. The identification has since been questioned, and the picture is also published as the portrait of an unnamed man, with Proust's name followed by a question mark.