Portrait of Henri Rochefort

In July 1880 the French parliament amnestied the Communards, and Henri Rochefort came home. He was a pamphleteer with a talent for insulting governments, sentenced to deportation for his part in the Paris Commune of 1871, shipped to New Caledonia, and off the island by boat in 1874. Manet painted that escape too, as a small grey seascape. This portrait he sent to the Salon of 1881, where the jury gave him a second-class medal, the first he had won in 20 years of submitting. He was 49 and already ill with the disease that killed him two years later. The Hamburger Kunsthalle bought the canvas from a Berlin dealer in 1907, after its director Alfred Lichtwark pressed for it, and it was the first Manet the museum owned.